- 11 Jun, 2026
- Alex Chen
Troubleshooting Moodle Cron Jobs and Scheduled Tasks
I’ve seen it too many times: a university’s Moodle instance, serving 50,000 students, …
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Infrastructure engineer with 9 years in higher-education IT. Started out as a sysadmin at a mid-sized regional university, maintaining a bare-metal Moodle deployment that the previous team had built on PHP 5.4 — and hadn’t touched since. Spent three years dragging that stack, screaming, into the container era.
Since then I’ve led LMS migrations for four institutions, ranging from 800-student vocational colleges to a 28,000-seat research university. The migrations were messy. A lot of things broke. I started writing about the specifics because I kept finding the same documentation gap: tutorials that tell you what to run, but not what happens when it doesn’t work.
I’m not affiliated with Moodle HQ, Instructure, or any LMS vendor. The opinions here are based on what I’ve broken and fixed in production.
Current focus: reducing the operational overhead of self-hosted EdTech through better Docker orchestration, automated monitoring, and — slowly — less YAML.
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