The Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Sul (IFSUL) is the most recent institution to join Moodle, a learning management system offered as a service by RNP. It is estimated that more than 20 thousand students will benefit from Remote Education (EaD) activities, mainly due to the pandemic and the demand for pedagogical activities not in person.

IFSul has 14 campuses distributed throughout the state of Rio Grande do Sul. According to the director of the institution's IT Department, Carla Pires, because of that, the Moodle  management in IF worked in a decentralized way, and the Education Pro-Dean´s Office was in charge, responsible for the offer of remote education courses for the 14 campuses. “Each campus had a Moodle installation, with different version and configuration. With the pandemic, the way this structure was organized made the operation of not in-person activities unfeasible”, Carla says.

According to the manager, to facilitate the management of this environment, the IFSul IT Department decided on migration and centralization of Moodle in RNP's cloud infrastructure. Among the main benefits mentioned, there are higher agility and efficiency in keeping the environment always updated and offering a uniform service for all campuses, in addition to the tool availability. “For this community, the main demand is availability. And the offer in cloud solution assures higher availability and security for the tool”, Carla Pires says.

The IT manager believes that, as in IFSul, other education and research institutions in the country are undergoing something similar, with the Education Pro-Dean´s Offices in charge of Moodle, responsible for the Remote Education activities in the institutions. With the pandemic, this topic is included in the IT Governance guidelines. "To maintain the management of the environment with the education and take Moodle to the cloud, withdrawing the responsibility for the IT Department's infrastructure, is the best alternative for small teams like most institutions have", she evaluates.

For Maria Isabel Giusti, from IFSul's  Education pro-Dean´s office, Moodle has been one of the bases for the progress of the remote education within the federal institute. Upon the increase in demand, regular courses for qualification on how to use this environment were released both in the teachers´ and students´ vision.

"Many teachers miss the integration of synchronous tools within the environment. Another demand is the difficulties to use Moodle by both the teachers and the students", she says. 

About Moodle

Moodle is a free learning support software, run in a virtual environment. There, it is possible to create your on-line lessons, offer a flexible learning model, to the students, whenever and wherever they want.

Since 2018, Moodle has been integrated to the Web Conferencing service, which has offered numberless benefits to the Remote Learning departments. For example, the possibility to start a lesson directly by the Web Conference, restricting the participation to authenticated users in Moodle, which assured independence to the teachers.

To request the service at your institution, contact RNP Service Desk through our service channels.

Tel.: 0800 722 0216  / atendimento@rnp.br.