Our annual Moodle upgrade

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Over the last couple of days we have been upgrading our Moodle site from 3.5 to 3.6.5. We upgraded at the same time last year and in order to ensure that our site is current and secure we are now committed to an annual upgrade to the highest long term support version. The upgrade went well with only a few minor CSS (text and icons formatting) issues, which were promptly resolved.

The process involves a number of stages and follows on from a practice run on our demo site:

  • Notify all users using email, warning notice on Moodle etc.
  • Put the site into maintenance mode
  • PHP upgrade to version 7.3
  • Moodle upgrade to 3.6.5
  • UAT testing using several accounts with different roles

This year we have taken a more coherent approach to our testing using UAT cards. Testers log in with a test account, each account has a different role e.g. student, non-editing teacher, teacher, External Examiner). The tester then works through a series of tasks recording if they pass or fail, and any issues. These issues are passed back to our developers to be resolved. We are also using a UAT test page and all activity is carried out in there. Tasks range from editing user profiles, adding and viewing content, checking assessments and some administrative activities.

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Version 3.6.5 brings its own set of new features (messaging, course layout etc.) but we have also added a few new features of our own including a new tab collapse format editor that allows you to flatten the page and move content between topics and tabs.

Over the next year we will be considering the theme we use on the site and our use of tabs collapse.

Thank you to everyone in ITS who helped with the upgrade process!

See Aurelie’s tweet:-

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