Very Large Course Launch

Very Large Course Launch

by Whitney Lowe -
Number of replies: 5

We need to launch a compliance course for approx. 25,000 people to be taken within a 3 month period of time. 

The company is spread out over the whole country with outlets in every state. We are looking for ideas on launch strategy so we don't wind up with thousands of users overwhelming our server trying to take the course during the last week. We need to propose something to the company that is reasonable and can be fairly easily communicated to the outlets. Our concern is site slow down and the inevitable frustration that brings to end users. 

Has anyone worked with this kind of large volume under very short time duration and what ways did you find to work around it?

Thanks in advance,

Whitney

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In reply to Whitney Lowe

Re: Very Large Course Launch

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

25,000 student over a 3-month period is not very large by some standards. About 50,000 users log into the main OU Moodle site every day at the moment.

And at the last UK MoodleMoot Catalyst IT gave a talk about a Moodle site they had built which could cope with 800,000 users logging in with 15 minutes.

So, what you need to do is well within the bounds of possibility. The main thing is to have good monitoring on your servers, so you can watch the load at busy times.

Still, you are right to want to spread the load as much as possible, and as you say, one likely peak is everyone leaving it to the last minute. Here is a random idea: why not offer a prize awarded at random each week, to one person who completes the course during that week (except for the last week). That might be enough of an incentive to get some people to do the course early. Also, announcing the prize-winner each week is a tactful way to remind people that they are supposed to do the course.

The other likely peak is if you mail-shot everyone at the same moment to tell them about the course. You should probably stagger announcing the course across the organisation over a few days.

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In reply to Whitney Lowe

Re: Very Large Course Launch

by Jez H -

Tims suggestsions on staggering announcements, finding ways smooth the load over the entire period are good.

You could actually enforce that using multiple enrollment keys with different start / end dates, or even separate copies of the same course and invite users to pre-enrol on the week that suits them best.

Tim mentions monitoring, that is all well and good, as long as you can do something about it if things start running a bit hot!

Using Cloud hosting / servers would be most flexible, but I guess you already have the hosting setup.

The other thing is where possible hive off large files and in particular video to external services, you really dont want to be serving video from you Moodle course files.

As Tim said, what you are doing is not that big a deal as long as you have reasonable hosting.

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In reply to Jez H

Re: Very Large Course Launch

by Whitney Lowe -

Jez: 
Very good suggestions here. Do you have recommendations on where to put video that your are storing outside of the course?

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In reply to Whitney Lowe

Re: Very Large Course Launch

by Jez H -

YouTube or Vimeo would be the obvious one, I think you can make videos private on YouTube but "how private" I dont know, but that may not be appropriate.

Kaltura is good, we use it, there is a Moodle plugin for it, the commercial service is quite expensive and almost certainly not appropriate for such short term use. As it happens I was just reading a blog about cloud integration for Kaltura:

www.panda-os.com/2013/09/panda-kaltura-aws-cluster-s3-cloudfront/

I have no idea how good those guys are or what they charge... just thought I would throw that one in.

Another service is screencast.com by techsmith, ive used that before and its ok, the players are not as good as the above options though.

To be honest could probably start a long running thread on this subject alone!

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