La Trobe University (LTU) is an Australian, multi-campus, public research university with its flagship campus located on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Challenge
LTU has an extremely active Moodle LMS, being one of the core business applications in their suite of learning delivery tools.
However, their previous Moodle was not easily controlled and monitored, leading to a disorganised and inefficient tool for teachers and students. In addition, LTU was finding it difficult to keep track of digital media assets.
Solution
A two pronged approach was adopted. In late 2015, Catalyst took over management of LTU’s LMS infrastructure, migrating it to Amazon Web Services. Since then, LMS uptime has been maintained at above 99% and there has been a 23% improvement in response times.
Following that, Catalyst was engaged by LTU to consult and deliver a platform that would act as a digital content repository.
Catalyst enabled and advanced La Trobe by simplifying the process for academic staff to access and add digital resources to their online course content in Moodle and Canvas; this was done by building a Drupal 8 site that leveraged Amazon Web Services Transcode and Elastic search services.
The upload form enforces certain metadata, for example, copyright. In the two years since go live in late 2017, LTU’s Digital Object Repository with Integrated Services (DORIS) has served more than 15 million video items. Teachers are now able to create video content with their phones for example, easily upload to DORIS and share it as course content embedded within the LMS. LTU has recently also allowed upload of audio and zip files.
Yet this was just the beginning. Over the years since we have continued to collaborate and grow together with new Moodle integrations and codebase updates.
We are always on hand to support La Trobe with ideas on how to harness the power of the ever growing features of Moodle.
