Perspective Chapter: Addressing the Learning Management System Challenges during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that most face-to-face higher education systems were not prepared to deliver online education. In this book chapter, the authors narrate how a learning management system, which was only used as an optional delivery mode before COVID-19 at a Comprehensive University in Botswana, has become an institutionalised system during and after the COVID-19 crisis. The book chapter clearly demonstrates the performance bottlenecks emanating from both the hardware and software stacks of the learning management system. Furthermore, the authors expound on the detailed end-user challenges by unravelling the varied performance and optimisation techniques used to mitigate the challenges faced.

1. Introduction

The academic years, 2020 and 2021, were very challenging for most academic institutions around the world because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government of Botswana declared a state of emergency by intruding successive extreme lockdowns and social distancing in the first week of April 2020, and the only Comprehensive University in Botswana (UB) was forced to close and suspend its teaching and learning activities. Most of the institutions, including UB, had to refocus their resources to fight the pandemic and ensure that teaching and learning continue so that learners are able to complete their programmes and graduate.

Although UB has been engaging in eLearning for more than twenty (20) years, first with WebCT and then Blackboard, and then later with Moodle Learning Management System (LMS), only a small percentage of academic staff were using this alternative teaching approach. The main reason was that eLearning was optional and there was no policy to compel staff to engage in it. However, things changed drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic when extreme social distancing was introduced. The institution put in place various strategies to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus among members of the university community by putting in place the necessary ICT infrastructure, installing online streaming equipment and using Moodle LMS.

Furthermore, lecturers were advised to deliver their lessons remotely and ensure that students receive their learning materials and attend lectures remotely. Lecturers started recording their lectures and sending them to their students who were all over the country (and even abroad) on lockdown through the Moodle LMS and other Web 2.0 tools. Despite all these efforts to ensure continuity in instructional activities, there were challenges of lack of resources to access learning materials, lack of skills to teach and/or learning online, unavailability of internet in some areas, etc.

The challenges that UB experienced were faced by other institutions not only during the COVID-19 pandemic but even before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges include unreliable internet connectivity [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and lack of training on the use of the LMS [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. There have been challenges such as resistance to change, high costs and lack of funding in some institutions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. In some instances, because academic staff have other duties to perform, it was observed that they could not concentrate on working in the LMS [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. However, although the challenges observed from the previous literatures are very similar to those that UB faced, there is need to extrapolate these challenges within UB’s context.

2. Elearning challenges faced by UB during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a myriad of teaching and learning challenges at UB. These challenges span from the preparedness of university policy framework, digital and social inequality to the preparedness of the academic staff and students to learn online [7].

2.1 Digital and social inequality

The use of digital technologies due to pandemic-induced swift transition from physical to digitalized remote teaching and learning exacerbated digital and social inequality amongst students as some of them did not have appropriate gadgets and internet to access their courses. The digital inequality in developing countries like Botswana is closely tied to contextual economic environment, such as income, utilisation of resources and unemployment levels, and these have an effect on how students use information and communication tools [8, 9]

For instance, students living in rural areas where the ICT infrastructure is poor are more likely to have challenges in accessing course materials through eLearning platforms from their instructors than those in urban areas [8, 9]. Similarly, the pandemic increased the existing gap in social inequalities between students in that, students from economically poor families were not able to afford laptops, smartphones, etc., and buy data, or have access to internet, compared to those in more affluent families. Hence shifting to remote teaching and inequality in access to digital learning opportunities had an adverse effect on some students.

2.2 The use of Moodle LMS for teaching and learning

Moodle learning management system (LMS) was used as the main platform for online teaching and learning, which was mostly used to host learning materials and for assessment purposes. Lecturers placed their lecture notes, handouts and web resources such as videos, e-books and journal articles meant for students to access and use for their learning. Some courses were also using tools within Moodle, such as assignment and quiz tools, for online assessment. There were also those courses that used communication and collaboration tools such as news forums, discussion forums and email to communicate and collaborate within their courses. It was only less than fifty percent (50%) of courses offered at UB that used Moodle LMS. Some instructors were reluctant to use Moodle LMS, and this was due to several reasons, such as perceived ease of use, attitude towards technology, technical support, training, personal innovativeness and self-efficacy. These are the same factors identified in the literature that have a significant relationship with behavioural intention to use a learning management system [1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13].

However, the UB has invested in ICT infrastructure and eLearning platforms to increase access to its programmes. In its University Strategy to 2028/29 ‘Creating a Future for the Knowledge Generation’, the key external drivers that could impact the university were identified as to promote access and equity in the higher education system and to rapidly develop information and communication technologies (ICTs), hence creating new opportunities for teaching and learning. The underlying rationale is to enhance the learning and teaching at UB by using blended learning context to support the development of innovative ICT-based content, services, pedagogies and practice for lifelong learning.

Hence, before the pandemic eLearning at UB was regarded as an option and some instructors hardly used Moodle LMS in their instructional activities. For instance, there were 1,974 courses offered at UB and only 655 (33.2%) of courses were offered online. Some instructors regarded use of digital technologies to teach as an extra job for them since they had to prepare their materials before uploading them to the eLearning platform. Efforts were made by the institution to address some of these factors, by, for instance, providing continuous training to equip instructors with the necessary skills of using the LMS for teaching and learning purposes, and improving their confidence. As postulated by Cigdem and Topcu [14] that instructors may not use LMS features efficiently if they lack training. The eLearning workshops conducted by the University of Botswana emphasized the benefits (or advantages of using the LMS) so that instructors understand the usefulness of the system in improving their teaching.

The hard lockdowns that were imposed throughout the country at the beginning of year 2020 forced the institution to come up and implement emergency preparedness plans and engage in emergency remote teaching (ERT) to try and complete the academic calendar. The ERT as it was commonly referred to was meant to provide short-term and reliable access to instruction and support during the pandemic relying heavily on available eLearning platforms. However, since UB was not fully prepared for the rollout of emergency remote teaching as it came at a very short notice, the implementation of emergency preparedness plans was haphazard and under-resourced. Even though the use of digital technologies has been on the agenda of UB for some time, neither instructors nor students were sufficiently equipped or skilled for remote teaching. Although continuous professional development on use of technology was provided all along, the efforts were intensified during the pandemic.

2.3 Moodle server infrastructure

The UB started using Moodle LMS as its main learning management system in year 2019 after phasing out Blackboard. The system was locally hosted, and the installation was done by the resident information technology (IT) experts and the storage was 300GB and content server increased from 450GB to 650GB, expandable to 2TB, which was supplemented by the 1TB granted on OneDrive for every staff member and UB student. All these expansions were done in preparation for the emergency remote teaching and in anticipation of the increase in online courses and learning activities that would be taking place online. However, it did not take long to experience storage limitations since a lot of content was generated by users, which needed a good amount of space to grow. Most of the content generated was multimedia content for eLearning materials such as videos downloaded from YouTube, lectures recorded from MS Teams and other lectures recorded by UB multimedia development and production team.

As the number of users increased the performance of Moodle began to be very slow, resulting in some of the activities such as the Quizzes and Assignments not working optimally. For example, online tests and examinations were adversely affected. In some cases, instructors could not upload course content as the system gave some error messages. The situation was exacerbated by the low bandwidth since UB at the time only had 2.5 Gbps internet connectivity, and worse still there were a lot of power outages at Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) and sometimes internet was not available at Botswana Telecommunication Corporation (BTC).

As indicated earlier that UB locally hosted its Moodle site, which therefore meant managing our own server. Initially, this seemed to be easier, but as the number of courses and users grew, it proved to be a very demanding task more so that IT department was not familiar with Moodle LMS, which has large and complex tools that require extensive technical expertise on server maintenance and technical support. The IT staff had to perform updates of new versions of Moodle, build new features, resolve technical glitches and manage integrations. Some instructors decided to use other technologies to reach their learners.

2.4 Use of other eLearning platforms

In addition to Moodle LMS, the institution used various eLearning platforms such as ZOOM, Microsoft Teams, Bluejeans, and social media (e.g., WhatsApp, Yammer and Facebook) to conduct instructional activities. The School of Medicine immediately after introduction of extreme social distancing started using Zoom. With this platform, they were able to do lecture presentations and hold discussions. But the excitement of using this platform did not last for long as there were issues with licensing and limitations in the number of people allowed to use the platform at a given time.

The university then licensed Microsoft Teams and all staff and students at UB have accounts in Microsoft Office 365 (MS 365) and each instructor has been allocated 1TB of storage in MS 365. This allows lecturers to share content in MS 365 OneDrive with their classes through a link in Moodle. MS 365 also has Yammer, which works like Facebook. All staff and students have access to it. Only UB community would have access to Yammer as compared to Facebook, which is open to public. It is ideal for collaborations and class discussions. Students can continually interact with students in the class. Instructors would need to create classes using their class list. Henceforth, MS Teams platform in MS 365 was also used for online learning. The instructors could also do a live feed (Synchronous)/live streaming in which the students beyond classroom contacts were able to join and be part of the class. This catered for most of the University of Botswana international students abroad who could not attend lessons because of the restrictions caused by COVID-19. MS Teams was also used for online collaboration and video conferencing. Staff duplicated content in Moodle to Office 365 as backup in case the content is not accessible in Moodle ensuring the online concept of everywhere, anytime and anyhow (flexibility).

The usage of social media platforms also increased, and some lecturers preferred to use social media platforms since most of the tertiary students engage through mobile technologies, which in a way influence their motives and social interactions [7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]. The most widely used application during COVID-19 period was WhatsApp. WhatsApp allowed lecturers to create groups for their classes according to class lists. With this platform, instructors could do text messaging, group chat, WhatsApp on web and desktop, voice and video calls, photos and videos, document sharing and links to web addresses [4, 6, 8, 16], and students were able to ask questions and interact with their peers. Students could do individual or group assignments and submit them online. The challenges that were observed were uploading very heavy files, storage of generated content and conducting online tests and exams.

2.5 Online lecture streaming equipment

As alluded to earlier, the institution used Microsoft Teams application in Microsoft Office 365 to record lectures and send them to students, and through this, it emerged that lecture recording is thus generating media-rich educational resources for blended and virtual classrooms. Hence, since the realization of the media-rich content (particularly audio and video), UB saw the need to install lecture recording equipment in a lecture theatre. Therefore, in 2021, nine (9) lecture theatres equipped with recording and streaming equipment to facilitate and enhance full implementation of blended learning as envisioned through the UB strategy. The system capture all audio and video of the instructor and all projected on-screen content and make the finished materials available to students via the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS). Students can attend live sessions wherever they are, even abroad. With some registered and potential students from across Botswana borders, online streaming would enable them to register, start and complete their studies competently without setting foot at the physical campus.

3. Addressing the LMS challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic

The challenges of the LMS users at UB faced spanned from the lack of technical skills to understand the hardware and software stack of Moodle LMS, professional development challenges, dealing with a hybrid eLearning platforms and resources, governance and policy issues. This section details the measures put in place to address the LMS challenges herein mentioned.

3.1 Professional development initiatives

The Educational Technology Unit of the Centre for Academic Development at UB embarked on a continuous professional development (CPD) for academic staff. The emphasis of the CDP initiatives for academic staff at UB is on the strategic integration and use of technology in teaching and learning. It is worth mentioning that these CPD initiatives were provided all along, but the efforts were intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. As an example, from February to November 2021, 266 instructors were trained. This was possible because the eLearning workshops were facilitated through MS Teams, hence there was no challenge of accommodating many participants since they could learn from anywhere. The training covered the following topics:

• Introduction to eLearning

• Instructional design for eLearning

• Introduction to Moodle

• Moodle communication tools

• Moodle assessment (Assignment/Tests/Exam)

• PlagScan (Moodle)

• Effective yse of multimedia graphics

• Teaching in the technology enhanced classroom

Coupled with the operationalisation of a dissemination and the workshops herein mentioned, the Educational Technology Unit offered webinars, showcases, panel discussions and demonstrations on online instructional design, and remote teaching and learning strategies. It was observed during the course migration process that some lecturers recycle materials from past years and have a lot of redundancy in the courses. The multimedia files being used in the courses have made some course to be voluminous, with some reaching 4 GB. A suggestion was made to use a repository that stores large multimedia files, and these will only contain a reference link in the Moodle LMS.

3.2 Knowledge of the Moodle LMS ecosystem

In the first quarter of 2022, it was observed that the setup of the Moodle LMS application needed to be optimised further by someone with higher skills than what the IT Department at UB currently possesses. The skills required included web server management, database optimisation, Moodle LMS performance tuning and optimisation and PHP programming skills. In general, UB required IT skills that address all issues related to the software and hardware stacks of the Moodle LMS infrastructure. A Moodle LMS task team with its terms of reference was established. The terms of reference of Moodle LMS task team were:

• Recommend through a report a cloud hosting solution for the UB Moodle LMS, which leverages the current Moodle infrastructure, resources and business processes.

• Formulate and recommend strategic and operational plans for Moodle LMS, which align with the university’s teaching and learning core line of business

• Monitor and evaluate the progress and performance of the Moodle LMS once hosted in the cloud.

• Formulate and advise on the responsibilities of IT department and Educational Technology Unit with respect to the use, administration, maintenance and review of the Moodle LMS within UB.

When the Moodle LMS was eventually hosted into the cloud there have been some positive rewards that came along with moving Moodle LMS to the cloud, and these, from an institutional point of view, should be regarded as constituting the best practices. As an example, by hosting Moodle LMS in the cloud, there is a seamless migration to the latest stable version of Moodle, which will contain the latest patches and bug fixes. The hosting company has an in-depth knowledge of the software stack for Moodle, and this is coupled with the in-house knowledge of Moodle, which has made the application stable.

3.3 Moodle LMS performance tuning and optimisation

Moodle LMS has been known through various research studies that it contains some performance issues [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 16]. Therefore, the Moodle system administrators should test the performance of the system by subjecting it to different number of users, especially at a time for conducting online quizzes with configuration of RAM, and the hard disk drives (HDDs) taking not of the virtual address space [16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22]. The Educational Technology Unit has implemented various caching optimisations by optimising the Moodle unified caching setup, utilising a combination of OpCache, MemCache, APCu, Redis and local and shared file system caches [23]. These implemented caching optimisation procedures and performance evaluation measures further stabilised the Moodle LMS and enhances positive user experiences. The caching optimisations and compression techniques implemented in the Moodle LMS at UB have resolved most of the serious performance issues, especially when several participants are attempting quizzes at the same time or when collecting feedback from participants, etc.

As a result of these experiences, the Educational Technology Unit at UB concluded that the entire Moodle LMS optimisation should be tested based on load testing the Moodle system, concurrently identifying and removing the performance bottlenecks. A proper and sound understanding of systems analysis, design, testing, implementation and review methodology needs to be understood by both IT and the educational technology unit teams to avoid any inconveniences to the users.

3.4 A skills development plan for IT and Educational Technology Unit staff

The institution recognised that Moodle LMS is now hosted in the cloud and an inventory of the skills gap in both IT and the Educational Technology Unit was done. All the necessary training needed by both departments was identified. It was agreed that the training must be given and passed for UB to be certain that it has the skills to manage and administer Moodle.

3.5 Addressing eLearning governance and policy issues

UB has initiated the development, implementation and institutionalisation of an eLearning Strategy (2022–2027), which intends to provide a holistic approach to facilitating eLearning initiatives in a well-coordinated and structured manner aligning with the university’s aspirations on the scholarship of learning, teaching and research. Accompanying the eLearning strategy is an eLearning policy, which has been well received within UB as it ensures that it has an equal footing in participating in the ICT educational developments. This should improve the university's rating and competitiveness locally and internationally. The eLearning policy is providing a structured assurance that the university remains competitive and maintains its position as a role model for best practices in tertiary education. It has also been observed that the university itself has recognised the need for an eLearning policy.

Ingrained in the policy is UB’s own eLearning philosophy, which advances institutional strategic priorities at the same time following global trends in higher education. The knowledge economy in the globalised world means that UB has no choice if it is to survive as a university of the twenty first century. As such the points above present compelling evidence for case for UB to develop and institutionalise an eLearning policy that needs to be actualised by an implementation and monitoring plan through a strategy. The same policy issues that affected UB were also found in a study that addressed factors affecting LMS usage in higher education institutions in Tanzania [24, 25].

3.6 Addressing the bandwidth and network infrastructure

The IT department at UB reviewed, redesigned and implemented all networks related issues including bandwidth, load balancing and security issues related to the Moodle ICT infrastructure. In the networking infrastructure review and implementation report included is how the computers in some laboratories are now setup for online examinations and tests. The lessons learnt from the report are as follows:

University of Botswana has acquired 6 GBps of bandwidth from Botswana Telecommunications Corporation Limited and has not exceeded 70% of the utilisation. This has been propelled by the drastic use of home internet or mobile internet technology. In short, UB’s bandwidth is still more adequate to sustain it for a few more years. UB does not have multi-internet connections due to budget constraints.

• In respect of the network core devices, the core network switch device at UB is running on Cisco C6807-XL. The CPU and Memory utilisation average is 19% and 20%, respectively. The statistics for the usage of the core network devices included CPU utilisation for 5 seconds: 13%/3%; 1 minute: 18%; 5 minutes: 18% rocessor memory pool total: 1516302416 used: 296147868 free: 1220154548 I/O pool total: 268435456 used: 130472080 free: 137963376, and the resource statuses herein mentioned, confirmed that the device is robust and idling in most cases.

• In respect of the FIREWALL (Perimeter Security Gateway), the perimeter firewall server was bought recently, and it has a horsepower engine, and the report showed that the server is being underutilised.

• In terms of security, the only vulnerability Moodle has is the authentication of users during the administration of online examinations or test writing, especially those who are outside the invigilated computer laboratories or the classrooms, but the system itself is compliant. The system is under in-depth security, being two layers of security gateways such that when the perimeter firewall is compromised, the corporate firewall will still be available for the protection of Moodle.

• With respect to systems resources, reference was made to the reports from both system and server administrators, to confirm the resource utilisation at the application level and in the hardware resource allocation matrix.

• Regarding system coding, the usage and features enabled will heavily impact the utilisation of resources and subsequently it might make the system unusable. It was advised that the system administrator can liaise with both network and server administrators to adjust relevant parameters to cushion any emerged drastic need that has been identified.

• Regarding the computer laboratories, all computers use wired media to connect to the backbone network, at the speed not exceeding 1 GBps. IT has not yet noticed any need to upgrade the backbone connections, as of now they are still being underutilised in respect of the data traffic load. The load balancing is appropriately done at the application level or at the server level in clustering.

In summary, the computer networking infrastructure review and implementation report indicated that the university network infrastructure, despite old devices here and there, remains robust to drive the Moodle LMS. The report further advised to put more emphasis on coding and optimisation of the system as well as the rightful resource allocation. Mostly, users and even some of the administrators have little knowledge to differentiate between network, system and server hardware problems. The source of the problem can only be identified if all relevant stakeholders are called on board to run the right diagnostic tools and analyse the findings. Addressing internet connectivity and bandwidth issues have been also cited in many research studies [26, 27, 28].

4. Conclusions

The skills gap within UB in most of the Moodle LMS software stack cannot be understated. Apart from caching optimisations and database optimisation skills that are urgently needed, the LMS administrators should acquire various levels of Moodle certifications. The urge to promote the skills development in Moodle software stack, Moodle administration and Moodle certifications at UB are commendable. As it has been observed that a reactive or a haphazard approach to the design, development and implementation of the Moodle LMS in UB has serious repercussions on the core business of teaching and learning.

Furthermore, it has been shown that there are no concerted efforts between the IT and Educational Technology Unit in consolidating the existing skills, knowledge and expertise of the Moodle ecosystem, and as a result these two departments duplicate duties and work in a siloed approach. This can only be the institutionalisation of policies and service-level agreements.

An in-depth understanding of Moodle assessment activities, from a design and implementation perspective, is required especially the native tools in Moodle that enhance the integrity of the assessments. This is coupled with sound pedagogical approach for online course design should be orchestrated by the Educational Technology Unit. Furthermore, in supporting the Moodle LMS users, an enhanced user support system that has tracking ability such as a helpdesk ticketing system needs to be in place and operational.

As has been alluded in this book chapter, there has been unanimous and compelling evidence for UB to develop, implement and institutionalise an eLearning policy that needs to be actualised by an implementation and monitoring plan through an eLearning strategy.

In a nutshell, the LMS usage challenges that UB encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic is relatively the same as those encountered by similar institutions. Putting in effective and efficient measures to address these challenges will directly increase the user adoption and acceptance of the LMS.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support from the office of the Director Centre for Academic Development and the Office of Research and Development at the University of Botswana for the funding for the applied research of the Moodle Learning Management System and the publication of the research findings.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.