Background
Monash University is one of Australia’s leading universities and ranks among the world’s top 100, supporting over 86,000 students and around 9,000 academic staff. Monash is an energetic and dynamic university committed to quality education, outstanding research and international engagement.
Challenge
Monash University first implemented their Moodle to increase student engagement and encourage collaborative learning. Moodle also helped Monash’s students to learn any time and anywhere.
Monash University wanted to improve their Moodle experience for both staff and learners. But, they required a platform and technical partner that could support their 86,000 students, as well as successfully migrate over 10,000 active courses (over 22 Terabytes of digital content), and an average of 14,000 page requests per minute and up to 9 million page views per week. Monash needed a reliable, trusted, expert partner: Catalyst.
Solution
Catalyst Australia worked to migrate the existing Monash Moodle site to Amazon Web Services (AWS), upgrade the codebase to the latest version and provide Enterprise-level managed services (including AWS hosting).
The key success factors for this project were using an agile approach and assigning business analysts to work closely with the product owner; Catalyst managed the entire project and was responsible for the delivery of Monash University’s legacy Moodle.
Moodle has provided a platform for Monash’s teachers to explore a more flexible and blended approach to teaching by designing online content and activities for their students to experience.
Throughout the initial migration project, Catalyst was responsible for the development, testing, project and change management. Since Go-Live, Catalyst continues to provide ongoing support, and Monash University is enjoying a reliable solution alongside hosting, future development, training and support.
Service Inclusions:
- An enterprise-grade Cloud Moodle Solution for the Office of Learning and Teaching
- Provision and management of all underlying AWS cloud infrastructure
- Access for +86,000 students
- Provision and management of up to five non-production environments for testing, development and acceptance testing
- Monitoring, backup and 24×7 availability.
All of this innovation, integration and configuration was made possible by open-source technology and expertise.
Catalyst continues to work with Monash as they innovate with Moodle to create and support a positive and sustainable educational framework. Indeed, our collaboration to deliver an e-assessment suite of tools that support online exams – “eAssessment” has been recognised internationally, receiving an award at the e-Assessment Awards 2021(external link).