The Education and Training Board of the City of Dublin has signed a EUR 158,400 support contract for its current Moodle eLearning environment, it announced in late November. The city’s cloud-hosted Moodle implementation was awarded to Wholeschool, an eLearning specialist in Northern Ireland.
Dublin’s education board CDETB wants to consolidate its existing Moodle installations, and in September started looking for a cloud based hosting solution. “The successful provider will provide a managed Cloud based hosting solution and support the migration, consolidation and development of existing Moodle websites in CDETB, and the setup of a Moodle provision for the CDETB Adult Education Service (AES)”, the organisation writes in its procurement document.
A new service provider was urgently needed, as the city’s provider “unexpectedly served notice to terminate services in mid-October 2016”, the document reveals. Wholeschool was the only service provider that responded to Dublin’s call for tender. The contract, signed in November, is for one year, but can be extended to three.
The education board has been working with Moodle at least since 2011, when it published a series of booklets to help its teachers “engage with different aspects of a virtual learning environment”. The booklets were one of the outcomes of the two-year, EU-funded VLEs4VET project, which ran from 2009 to 2011.