VOLUMES
447,000 learners last year
4,000 concurrent learners at peak
consuming 70 mb/s of bandwidth
99.98% systems availability
The learndirect learner management system (LMS) like most learning management systems is more than a website with lots of content.
Content sites like the BBC or CNN while they have some personalisation, typically present their consumers with a collection of web pages. If they are personalised at all they present their consumers with a sub-set of content according to preferences or tracked activity. Critically, the content itself does not change from consumer to consumer and as a result can be load-balanced across a number of serves or caches and requires relatively little tracking.
Learner management systems such as the learndirect system track a learner's progress through a piece of learning and adapt in response to on-programme formative assessment. Such systems do expect to modify content according to consumer behaviour and as a result the use of multiple content servers only works to an extent. Such systems require a single authoritative data source for each course.
Additionally, consumers visiting a news or similar site have plenty of choice. If the BBC site is slow or not there for whatever reason, there are plenty of other such sites for a consumer to visit.
With web delivered learning, the consumer is intending to engage in a formal learning activity that they have formally enrolled in and in many cases have traveled to one of our learning centres to take their course. There is no other site for them to go to. If the site is slow or closed, then their journey was a waste of time.
For this reason the system must be both available and perform well. It is not enough that a system is available and returns content. If e-learning is to be effective, the medium needs to be as un-intrusive as possible; content has to render without the consumer becoming aware of any wait.
This presents us with a double bind; each user's content is customised and there is a service expectation of 100% availability and responsiveness. In addition, we have issues of large scale and 24 x 7 availability we can see that constructing such a service is a serious web engineering exercise.
If you are not monitoring the service, then you are just running software.
It's never good when the first person to tell you that your service has a problem is one of your consumers. Without appropriate monitoring software this will inevitably be the case, and in all probability they won't tell you immediately.
So, the first key differentiator between a service and a system is Monitoring.
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