QMplus will be upgraded from its current 2.2 version to a newer 2.6 version of Moodle in July 2014. The following page outlines the upgrade plan.

Before the upgrade ‘go live’ date…

1. In the weeks leading up to the ‘go live’ date, IT Services and ELU will be carrying out tests on an upgraded 2.6 QMplus environment.
2. Key staff will be able to access this upgraded environment before the ‘go live’ date, on request, in order to preview any changes.

Preparing to ‘go live’

1. During the week beginning 14^th July, both the old 2.2 and the new 2.6 QMplus environments will be placed in read-only mode. This will allow the technical team to backup and transfer all live and current data from the 2.2 to the upgraded 2.6 environment.
2. Final tests will be carried out by the ELU and IT Services before the new 2.6 environment is released to the public.

Read-only means that staff and students will be restricted to certain activity within QMplus – Generally, users will be able to view content, but not add or edit anything. The following is a guide taken from our service provider’s website (ULCC):

** Turnitin capabilities are not set correctly in QMplus so that if the view capability is set to allow but edit or submit is turned off a user can still access submit.ac.uk which can result in database updates.

ULCC have to maintain that there are no updates to prevent data loss or corruption

The QMplus upgrade ‘Goes Live’

1. QMplus will be completely unavailable on Thursday, 17th July.  Once testing is completed satisfactorily, the upgraded version of QMplus will become available to all staff and students.
2. Staff and Student will be able to access the new environment via the same URL at: https://qmplus.qmul.ac.uk
3. Any live teaching will continue in the upgraded environment and will remain untouched – i.e. students, data, content and activities (including assignments) will remain, although new 2.6 features and functionalities will now be available.

After the upgrade

The new 2.6 QMplus environment:

1. All teaching activities will take place in the new upgraded environment – this includes courses that run over the upgraded period and also any resit student activities.
2. For courses which run over the upgraded period – i.e. courses which begin before the 17th of July AND end after the 17th of July (for example Post Graduate courses or courses which require Resit student submissions) – content and activities will be transferred to the new 2.6 upgraded environment (any assignments which were set up on the 2.2 environment, will be brought over to the 2.6 environment). Staff will continue teaching as before, but now in the new 2.6 environment, until teaching finishes.When you are ready to start a new course area for the next cohort of students, you will need to ‘duplicate‘ your course area. This can be done by raising a request via the ITS online helpdesk or by sending an email to its-helpdesk@qmul.ac.uk with the subject line: ‘Duplicate QMplus course required’. It is important that you duplicate your course area so that you will not lose any data.

Duplicating a course will create a copy of the course area on the 2.6 environment. The newly copied course area will be wiped of student enrolments and student generated data (e.g. grades, coursework, discussion posts (optional) etc). The previous course area will be kept, with content and data, on the live production environment as an archive until the next rollover and archival process.

3. For courses which will begin after the 17th July 2014 (for e.g. courses which start in September 2014) – key administrative staff will need to ‘rollover‘ their courses in order to prepare it for the next cohort of students.

Rolling over the course will remove all old student enrolments and student generated data (e.g. grades, coursework, discussion posts (optional) etc). The old course with student enrolment and data will remain on the old 2.2 QMplus archived environment (see below).

4. Staff will be able to set up either old 2.2 assignments or new 2.6 assignments in the new environment (although it is recommended that 2.6 is used)

The old 2.2 QMplus environment:

1. Staff and students will be able to access an archived version of the 2.2 QMplus environment via the URL http://2013.qmplus.qmul.ac.uk or by navigating through the archive index page at: http://archive.qmplus.qmul.ac.uk
2. Students will continue to have read-only access to the 2.2 archived environment.
3. Staff will have a minimum grace period of 8 weeks – this will allow full access to the archived 2.2 environment, in order for staff to be able to remove or hide content from students.
4. After this grace period, the 2.2 archived environment will become read-only for both staff and students.
5. Please note: this archived environment is intended to be a teaching and learning resource for staff and students to be able to refer to content/material which was used at that time. The archive is not intended for a repository of students grade and assessment information… although this data may be accessible, it should not be relied upon for authenticity.

Upgrade, Rollover and Archive diagram

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Image Credit: ULCC