Moodle is one of the best platforms for virtual or blended courses, even for supporting face-to-face courses, where several resources and interactions need to be available anytime, not depending on teacher/student coincidence in space and time.
But in MOOC the situation changes, due to a large number of users, who potentially can take part in activities. Two main concerns rise here:
-Are tools, supported by Moodle, adequate for successful methodological work with a large number of participants?
-Are software tools and services, which are part of Moodle, powerful enough to manage expected a large number of requests?
maybe this could help you : http://www.inasp.info/uploads/filer_public/30/54/3054b6a8-a6eb-4ba2-98f6-027e2e3d7a7a/authoraid_mooc_lri.pdf
@Bruno De Lièvre Thank you for your post, this document shows an experience to be considered carefully.
With more than 40.000 users enrolled, Mysql may misbehave... (Concurrency is something not to be taken lightly.) But overal, the software part is quite stable. You should be more carefull with the hardware part. Ah, and mind the backup system! Don't underestimate it.
Please check:
Conference Paper MOODLE MONITORING BEST PRACTICES
Now, the infrastructure needed to build a Moodle system is quite different from another to hold and stream movies. Are you thinking about using the same infrastructure to do both things? If that is the case, are you going to stream 1080p videos (or higher resolutions) on your MOOC's? How many concurrent users, and how many different videos are we talking about? (For that, you should have in account the storage device Input/Output operations per second (IOPS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS)
Some time ago I had this exact argument with a friend that came up with the following, to avoid using the "rule of thumb", and have some proper metrics on what to choose:
"Assume 500 users, accessing different 1080p video streams (10Mb/s or 1.25MB/s) from disk (i.e. no caching) is 625MB/s. Assuming the data is read in 4kB blocks ("normal" filesystem blocksize), then this is 160,000 IOPS (625MB/s == 640000KB/s, 640000KB / 4KB = 160,000).
To satisfy that with spinning disks doing 200IOPS, you'd need ~800!
It's possible that the 4kB blocksize is too pessimistic, and the data can be read in larger chunks. But, assuming 12 x 200 IOPS HDDs, the blocksize would have to be 256kB - that means that for 128kB blocks you'd need 24HDD, etc.
Note that the number of HDD ignore overhead for RAID configurations, which would increase the number of disks at a minimum by n+1(RAID 5), or n+2 (RAID 6) or by n*2 (RAID 1). I would not have large numbers of disks (>10) in a RAID5/6 because of problems caused by a rebuild.
Assuming a 200 IOPS HDD is €200 (I think this is too cheap) and a blocksize of 128kB, then 24 * 200 = €4800 Assuming a 80000 IOPS SSD is €500 ([1], not "enterprise" pricing), then 2 * 500 = €1000"
Ah, and if you are going to do assessments on Moodle itself (evaluate users with quizzes), maybe you should check these papers also:
https://www.researchgate.net/project/MoodleWatcher
Hope this helps.
Best regards.
@Rodolfo Matos. Thank you very much for your detailed information. In fact, considering current practices in MOOC (and not only), it is crucial take into account the possibilities of DBMS, and the demand for video using. Anyway, one can think on Moodle as the central point of some kind of the PLE for cMOOC users, where those highly demanding operations could take place somewhere in Internet (let's say Youtube as, BTW, is the practice of many xMOOC platforms).
@Rey Segundo Guerrero-Proenza, you are welcome.
Yes, YouTube or Vimeo et al. are perfect replacements for an internal streaming infrastructure.
Except when you have a pay-per-view M$OC.
Although it is possible to control the access to contents present in YouTube to some extent, making them only available by embedding them in a course in Moodle, its' not a completely full-proof solution.
One just need to search "youtube downloader" to see what I mean.
(And maybe I'm being (a bit) cynical about this, but I think that If people are required to pay to access YouTube content, sooner or later, those links are going to appear in the wild.)
However, in the case that the MOOC is free, and/or these security issues are not a problem, I completely agree with you.
Hello, this could help you : https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=324905
@Bruno Thank you very much, just several minutes ago, in our Department, we were discussing on Moodle 3.0 and MOOC.
Our university is using Moodle for learning at scale (biggest class so far is around 500 students), but to convert that classroom to a MOOC, our LMS Expert has informed us that we need 2 different Moodle platforms to ensure best user experience. While Moodle is a robust platform, the course instructor expertise in managing a large course online, is an important factor to consider.
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