Institutional LMS at Scale

Business Goal

Trinity Western University relies on Moodle and WordPress multisite as core infrastructure for teaching, accreditation artifacts, and public academic presence. Leadership needed consistent uptime, predictable change management, and support coverage that instructors could trust during intensive assessment periods.

Problem Statement

Scale introduced friction: heterogeneous plugin stacks, brittle gradebook integrations, Turnitin coupling, and ticket patterns that resurfaced each term. One-off fixes were not enough — the constraint was how to operate the stack as a system with repeatable diagnostics, safer releases, and clearer ownership between learning design and engineering.

Solution

I focused on platform hygiene and integration discipline: narrowing plugin surface where possible, tightening grade-export and plagiarism workflows for edge cases instructors hit in production, and documenting pathways so escalation had context. I also negotiated direct partnership and shell access with our service host (BCNET), then built automated monitoring, health-check, and release workflows on top of it — unlocking operational moves the team previously could not perform.

Outcomes

• ~80% drop in Moodle & WordPress support tickets — from roughly 300 per month down to ~60, by closing recurring failure modes at the source instead of the ticket queue.
• ~80% reduction in system downtime via service monitoring, health analysis, and proactive remediation, so peak grading and registration windows stayed reliable.
• Strengthened partnership with BCNET (the institutional hosting provider), including SSH access — enabling automated workflows across internal projects that were previously not possible to operate from our side.
• Contributed 10+ Moodle plugins for TWU and the wider Moodle community, addressing gaps that improved day-to-day experience for instructors, students, and admins.