Located in Melbourne and founded in 1958, Monash University is a public university with over 86,000 students and 17,500 staff. Aside from being the largest university in Australia, Monash University has international campuses in countries including, China, India, Italy and Malaysia, and ranks among the top 75 universities in the world.

Monash University has consistently produced graduates dedicated to excellence, with a number going into fields such as finance, governance, research, literature, activism, amongst others.

Catalyst IT Australia transforms Monash University’s legacy Moodle

Case Study

ChallengeGiven the sheer scale of Monash University’s student population, its Learning Management System needs to be robust and reliable to support the large volume of data. Moreover, it needs to deliver an optimal learning experience for students, at times of peak demand.

As the number of students at Monash University grew, the organisation saw a need to upgrade their existing Moodle site for scalability and efficiency. Certified Premium Moodle Partner Catalyst IT, with over 20 years of experience in eLearning services, provided a tailor made solution to Monash University’s needs.

Migrating Moodle for over 86,000 students

Catalyst IT AU’s first course of action was to migrate Monash University’s Moodle sites to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and recondition the codebase of these sites to the updated version.

In addition to this, Catalyst IT AU took responsibility for providing an enterprise-level managed service, that included certified expert Moodle support.

Using an agile approach, Catalyst IT AU assigned business analysts to work closely with the team at Monash University to deliver a seamless, efficient upgrade that retained full interoperability.

Throughout the initial migration project, Catalyst IT AU led the way in development, testing, and project and change management.

Catalyst IT AU also provides on-going

support to Monash University for their

Moodle sites, including future development, training and hosting.

ResultsIn order to guarantee these sites are managed and operating properly, Catalyst IT AU constantly monitors site performance; the multi-region, 24/7 support model provides live ‘real people’ response, at times when clients need it most.

As Certified Premium Moodle Partners, the team at Catalyst IT AU has also taken over the provision and management of all underlying AWS cloud infrastructure for Monash University, making sure their learning management system is always ready to be scaled up. This provides the university with a sustainable and dynamic educational framework.

Thanks to working closely with Certified Moodle Partner Catalyst IT AU, Monash University will also have the opportunity to weigh in on the continued development of the open source Moodle LMS.

When organisations put their eLearning projects in the hands of Certified Moodle Partners like Catalyst IT AU, they get access to a vast well of untapped potential of the open source LMS.

After migrating their Moodle sites, Monash University now has a learning environment that:

hosts 86,000

students

has 10,000 active courses

responds to an average

of 14,000 requests per minute

handles up to

9 million page views each week

About Catalyst

Visit moodle.com

Catalyst IT is a multi-region group of open source software specialists, with operations in Australia, the UK, Canada and New Zealand. The group has contributed to the success of Moodle since 2004. They offer a full range of IT services to support Moodle, ranging from front-end consulting through to custom DevOps, managed services and hosting, including migration to a cloud infrastructure.