Last year, the technology department implemented Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) as STA’s website for homework, teacher pages and announcements.
Over the summer, the technology team had no way to estimate how much activity Moodle would receive during the school year. They thought the server they had used in previous years would be big enough to handle all of the activity.  However, according to STA’s technology support Jeff Zimmerman, Moodle was often down at the beginning of the year because the school’s original server was not prepared for the amount of activity it received.
“The hardware just couldn’t handle [all the activity] so it crashed,” Zimmerman said. “Computers and servers get to a point where if they run out of resources, they eventually give up. It’s like when a human tries to run a marathon, eventually they just run out of energy.”
According to Moodle administrator Renee Blake, the server simply became overloaded.
“The server [Moodle] was sitting on …couldn’t process all of it,” Blake said. “It’s like if 10 people were talking to you at once, you wouldn’t be able to process everything being said, and you would eventually just shut down.”
Since the beginning of the year, the technology team has moved Moodle to a larger server.
“We’ve been doing a lot of computer updates and server updates to make sure things run smoothly, which they have been lately,” Zimmerman said.
According to Zimmerman, updates sometimes change settings on Moodle, causing it to crash.  The technology team disabled automatic Windows updates on each student’s netbook to keep things consistent. Every student now conducts their manual updates on netbook reboot Wednesdays.
“With much luck, automatic updates won’t be happening at all,” Zimmerman said. “The updates were disabled on the netbooks at the beginning of the year but then somehow they were enabled again. We have fixed it, and hopefully it shouldn’t be a problem anymore.”
According to Zimmerman, all necessary updates are done manually.
“When [manual updates] are needed, I stay up until 3 a.m. doing them so students don’t feel that Moodle is down [after school],” Zimmerman said.
According to Blake, since Moodle now functions consistently, website problems can no longer be an excuse for incomplete homework.
“I think what a lot of students don’t realize is that [Moodle] keeps track of every teacher’s page a student gets onto and how many times and [when],” Blake said. “[Teachers] can check if you really could get on Moodle by when others were on.”
According to Blake, despite the technology difficulties at the beginning of the year, things have been going pretty well so far.
“This is just the first year of these netbooks, so we are still learning,” Blake said. “As time passes, things will get even better.”
