Issues with Moodle and GoogleClassroom

In my university, we've been using Moodle for many years (>5y). There was a general negative opinion on the Moodle for very different reasons, from "it's ugly" to "it's not up to date", going through "everyone thinks it's crap, me too". Since 2 years I've been pushing the staff to update it so we can have a more precise opinion on the Moodle, ie will it fix all the concerns raised by the student and staff using it? And more importantly fix all security issues that have been patched in the 7 new versions, which, I think was the main reason to update the Moodle.

At the beginning of this year, a new staff responsible for coordinating the teaching, set up Google ClassRoom as a mean to fix the general issue that people were not happy with the Moodle. But leaving the security issue of the Moodle which is still used as GoogleClassRoom doesn't provide everything Moodle provided.

So I kept asking for the update of the Moodle, for the security reason. Eventually, an administrative staff made all the work to have estimates on how it would cost to update and transfer the database and so on, and everything is ready to be updated, we just need the agreement of one or two people, which keep saying that it can wait, or that's not the priority, and security issues are not really an issue.

To sum up, GoogleClassRoom have mixed opinion on it. Some people are fine with it and find it very convenient for many things, in particular the Google Drive possibilities. And some other people eventually find that the Moodle is not so bad despite the old version, or people refusing to subscribe to a google service, and prefer to use open source software rather than a software from a private company.

On both side there are people with high responsibilities.

I think there are 2 issues here:

• The security issue, which from my point of view can't be negotiable as it exposes the entire university.


• The choice of an e-learning platform between an open source and a "closed source" one.

How would you handle that situation ? Do you think we could use both platform ? If not, what would be the pros and cons (once Moodle is updated)? How can I convince people to update the Moodle ? Am I paranoid on the security issue ? (We're using version 1.9)

To clarify the overall picture, I'm student representative, and when I said "I" above, it was as a student representative with my colleagues, reporting student concerns. We're representing about 1/3rd of all the student (at the PhD level), but it's the e-learning platform for all students. When I say University, it's not really a university, it is a special place as it's a new "university" (<10yo) seeking new way of teaching, it's a very open minded place, and in general advocate the use of opensourceness. It's not a big university. It's in Europe.