So close, but not quite.
Our district mandates that we use Canvas with our students. They subscribed a few years ago and we’re required to at least have an assignment calendar.
But I prefer Moodle. I’ve used it for years and feel that it’s a better fit for the way I teach. And I like it enough that I’m willing to spend a few bucks a month for a Moodle server.
I tried to set everything up on a cheap, $5 droplet at Digital Ocean. And I was able to get everything set up.
The question bank and quiz system is just way better in Moodle so I was planning on embedding Moodle quizzes into Canvas as an LTI provider.
But that first launch is where I hit a snag.
Starting a quiz in Moodle is really database intensive and a couple of dozen students all starting a quiz at the same time was enough to slow my cheap droplet down to a crawl. Some students had a 3 or 4-minute wait until the quiz actually started and the server load was 50+.
The fix was to move the Moodle database to a separate Digital Ocean droplet that I was using for MySQL databases only. I already had that sitting around for some other projects, so it didn’t cost me anything extra. But it does push it past just a $5 droplet.
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