13.1 Running a service is not a system

Running a service is not a system

What or who is ufi learndirect?

“The concept of a ‘University for Industry’ led to the creation of Ufi in 1998. The organisation then set-up learndirect, a nationally recognised brand for learning. In six years learndirect has become the largest e-learning network of its kind in the world, and has individualised the delivery of learning to a mass audience through a unique combination of flexibility, accessibility and support.”

In this piece I plan to talk a bit about our e-learning platform and the part that open source tools and systems have played in our success.

Technical and service context

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.