SKSI/MeetingNotes/2021-07-30 Meeting

Present: Varunesh, William, Nehru, Wayne, Dave

We discussed current tech projects MESC is pursuing with schools in Samoa, including a pilot providing Moodle instances to 80 schools. These are being provided by MoodleCloud. We discussed costs - approximately (US?)$70k for the Moodle instances - and various ways to achieve similar results with self-hosted Free and Open Source Software, but with greater flexibility and potentially with great cost savings.

We discussed self-hosted Moodle, WordPress Multisite (which could provide a separate, relatively easy-to-manage website for each school in Samoa on a single instance), BitWarden (a password manager that could ease the task of managing unique passwords for each site an individual has and provide organisational groups for 'shared secrets'), and Rocket.Chat, the chat system the OER Foundation uses.

Lastly, we discussed the Moodle instance run by MESC and how to encrypt it with a secure (SSL) certificate. Nehru and William suggested they were awaiting a certificate from an external vendor, so we discussed the Let's Encrypt initiative which provides SSL certificates at no cost through straightforward process that the OERF has built into all its deployments.

We arranged for the OERF to provide a demo of some of these technologies for the next session.