It’s been a busy few months for us, so I just thought I’d sum up what we’ve been doing to attempt to protect us during the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Moved our Moodle instance to Azure
• Upgraded from Moodle 3.6.3 to Moodle 3.8.2
  • Moved to a Boost based theme
  • Emails passed to on premise Exchange to be sent

The move to Azure was crucial to best serve our students who are now more than ever relying on our VLE. This year all our exams and coursework submissions are taking place within Moodle.

With the above it goes without saying we needed to be on the securest available version available which happens to be the latest release of Moodle, this is in order to minimise any malicious attacks.

If you are planning such moves, I would suggest moving a like for like instance to the cloud as step #1, then perform any required upgrades, don’t be tempted to combine the two stages.