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CLE Quiz Statistics Fixed, Reactivated

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Initial Issue 

Qbank_statistics plugin was turned off due to critically poor performance, which made course administration impossible.  

Issue Duration  

Five+ months (starting July 15 - Dec. 20, 2023 ). 

Summary 

On July 10, 2023, the Education IT team received reports that some CLE course administration actions were generating a 504 Gateway Time-Out error that was preventing normal activities.  

The Education IT team’s investigation revealed that an underlying issue with the Quiz statistics plugin caused the error. The error itself originated at the core Moodle level. The immediate, suggested workaround was to turn off the Quiz Statistics plugin while an external fix was pending.   

The initial fix uncovered several more issues. Following a thorough review of these issues, reactivating the plugin at that stage could have produced bad data when changes were made to a quiz. Hence, the plugin remained turned off. 

The last of the issues was resolved in Moodle 4.1.7, which was released on Dec. 11, 2023. The Education IT team tested the plugin’s fix internally and with UCSF end-users to ensure it performed as intended and no longer prevented any other administrative actions. Tests were successful, and the Education IT team reactivated the Quiz Statistics plugin on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023.    

Moving Forward 

Not having access to the quiz statistics functionality has significantly impacted UCSF's teaching and learning processes. The Education IT team has made several critical investments, as well as initiated plans, to improve our capacity to respond to these types of problems in the future: 

  1. Education IT has joined the Moodle Users' Association as a "Silver" member, giving us a greater voice in determining how reported issues/bugs are prioritized in the community. In the future, we will leverage this membership—and its prioritization points—to bring our campus' unique needs to the forefront on a larger scale.  

  1. We have begun selecting and contracting with a vendor who can augment our development team and give us the resources to fix issues like this ourselves. Moodle is an open-source platform, which means we can allocate our own resources to addressing and solving issues/bugs affecting core Moodle applications like the Quiz Statistics plugin. It will make it easier for our team to do so by having an open agreement with a contractor expert in Moodle development.  

  1. We are growing our UCSF Moodle development expertise: The Education IT team continues to grow our internal engineering team and is working with other IT teams to hire and train Moodle developers. We have the internal technical expertise to resolve various issues/bugs affecting core Moodle applications; however, in the case of the quiz statistics issue, our resources required us to balance and prioritize competing critical tasks. We can address and fix future issues internally and more quickly by adding additional resources.