We are currently on ANGEL but are now poised and eager to transition to Moodle starting this fall (2011). Recently, I lead a group of over a dozen faculty testers at a health sciences university representing 7 schools through an open-source pilot evaluation of Moodle 1.99 for 10 weeks and then Sakai 2.7 for 10 weeks, based on 300 pedagogical variables. Moodle 1.99 hands down beat out Sakai 2.7 in nearly every category (quizzes, gradebook, content organization, etc.) vis-a-vis usability, stability, and functionality. And let me remind you that you are using Moodle 2 on right now too And these are just the ones who've bothered to register (which in my experience at Moots is a low percentage). If the threat of a deadline helps this then I'm all for it.įor some context, at the moment we have over a thousand Moodle 2 sites registered on MOOCH, and there are 20 or so big active ones (including Universities) with thousands of users. If there are deficits or problems for your implementation case, please get involved and report them, vote for issues and write code for them. We need to break the chicken/egg cycle where everyone is waiting for everyone else to do the work. On the other hand, people do need to start preparing for 2.0 and kicking the tires at least. Perhaps our policy should be something like "we support any old branch that has more than 20% of the total registered sites". I am probably being overly optimistic about the number of sites that will migrate by then, but we'll see. And secondly, if there are still significant quantities of 1.9 installations out there by December then I'll of course direct more of our efforts into supporting 1.9 for longer. Firstly, just because Moodle HQ doesn't put resources into support for 1.9 at some point in the future it doesn't mean others can't or won't. Given the popularity of Moodle these days and that this is a major change of functionality, I'm sure expiring Moodle 1.9 at the end of this calendar year is too early. I would suggest that the support "lifecycle" (if that's the right way of putting it) needs to be long enough to accomodate both the southern and northern academic years. I'm confident that we have the capacity in our company to support 1.9 (because I could foresee, given the history of support that Tim and Martin have both outlined, that this might happen) but I can see that many schools in the northern hemisphere won't be so lucky. The rollout will be finished Summer 2011 and migration to Moodle 2.x is timetabled to take place Summer 2012. I'm in the middle of managing the roll out of Moodles across British International Schools and we have had to go with 1.9 because the third party modules needed to support the curriculum aren't yet ported to 2.x and I didn't have money in the budget for us to do that ourselves. Of course anyone else can jump up and offer to maintain 1.9.x after December if they like. I doubt we can stretch beyond that, because it's getting harder and harder for our developers to remember how to write code for 1.9 This would normally mean that we would stop supporting 1.9 when 2.1 comes out, but given that it's such a big jump to 2.x, and the release timing was bad for the north hemisphere, I plan to keep putting resources into supporting 1.9.x until December 2011.
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