Coventry University Group is committed to providing a modern, reliable and scalable online learning environment to meet the rapidly growing demands of its campus, blended and online learning communities.

The University have been using Moodle as its Learning Management System (LMS) since 2008 and has one of the largest online learning environments in the country with approximately 45 000 active users (unique log ins over 3 month period). It is anticipated that this will expand significantly over the next four years to approximately 100 000 users and that a significant proportion of these will be via distance learning courses. The Group includes a range of subsidiaries who operate multiple intakes throughout the year.

Currently both the software management for Moodle and Mahara (E-Portfolio) and hosting infrastructure are outsourced. The University has recently acquired in-house provision of Azure and is in the process of setting up Amazon Web Services (AWS) and wishes to host on one of these platforms.

We are therefore seeking to replace our combined software and infrastructure services with a managed service hosted on either Azure or AWS. To facilitate this we are looking for a supplier who has experience and expertise hosting Moodle / Mahara in this way who can support the University's transition to this new hosting model and manage the service thereafter.

The chosen supplier must have experience of large Moodle implementations, preferably within the Higher Education environment and be able to show how they would quickly scale to meet rapid changes to student usage and numbers. They must also have experience of advising on Moodle architecture, installing upgrades and thorough testing.

It is expected that the contract will be for a 3 year period and renewable for two periods of one year thereafter. A description of the kind of solution the University wishes to purchase can be found in LMS Hosting Service Description document.