Moodle glitches disrupted some classes last week.

The manufacturer and the ULM computing center were able to identify the problem and put in a solution that will stop the problem from happening again.

The moodle site crashed March 12 because of a failed upgrade that caused an interruption to the customer sites. Since Moodle is not on campus, this problem could not be handled by the ULM computing center alone.

The Moodle crash mainly affected those who had assignments to submit by Tuesday evening.

“I had one student tell me that it was a real issue. There was an assignment due, but I extended the due date so it was not a major factor,” said Kim Taylor, Instructor of computer science.

According to the Moodlerooms company, “The root of the problem was due to a failed upgrade of a series of switches within the Dell cloud data center.”

To ensure that this problem does not happen again, Moodlerooms will update and improve their communication and maintenance processes with the Dell engineers in the Plano, Texas, datacenter. They are also planning to move all the customers to a new and improved data center in Virginia. Moodlerooms states that this will offer better performance, speed, security and reliability.

“Fortunately for our site, the Moodle outage was only down during the late night/early morning hours and we didn’t have any instructor/student issues arise due to this issue,” said Chance Eppinette, interim director of the ULM computing center.

However, some instructors seem to have different views of the problems that occurred with Moodle.

Jeffery Anderson, a history professor, said the crash that happened at night only affected a few of his students.

“Another of my classes had assignments due on the second day of Moodle being down,” he said. “And once I saw that some were having trouble getting assignments in, I extended the deadline.  From my perspective, the crash was very annoying…”