Due to the increasing acceptance of learning management systems (LMS), the number of users per installation has also constantly increased over the past few years. Only a short time ago, applications were considered to be “large” if they had more than 50,000 users. Nowadays, large groups of several hundred thousand users are often formed as a result of mergers and company-wide activities. These scenarios create huge technological and specialist challenges for LMS.
During a global economic crisis, major companies review their IT budgets, with the aim of cutting costs, and replace comparable applications, which often exist in parallel for historical or regional reasons, in favour of a standardised company-wide solution.
In such cases, the number of registered users in major companies can quickly increase to 400,000 people or more. If an LMS is managed for a company-wide group of customers, even groups of over 1 million users are possible. Examples of this include operator scenarios for nationwide collective organisations or public-sector organisations with a legally binding training order. In contrast to the situation within companies and universities, these scenarios involve a high level of uncertainty with regards to anticipated user behaviour. This results in difficult challenges for the technology and particularly the specialist architecture and scalability of LMS applications.
Specialist scalability requirements
Leading LMS applications in the market, such as CLIX, today offer their operators almost unlimited options for the design of online supported teaching and learning arrangements – whether this involves the support of complex workflows for booking on-site events, the presentation of training programmes based on a blended learning application, or basic online courses for the autodidactic appropriation of knowledge.
This is made possible due to the high level of configurable characteristics and functions of an LMS, which can help to create individual virtual learning worlds. However, from a specialist point of view, it is doubtful whether making use of the entire range of these theoretical opportunities within the scope of an LMS operation is a sensible option when there is a very high number of users. Upon closer examination, it quickly becomes clear that a tutor would only be able to accompany a course with 200,000 booked users at a very high organisational cost. For data protection reasons, in the selected examples it would also be critical for course participants to be able to follow the learning status of their co-learners.
Opportunities to make the teaching process applicable to the mass market are far more in demand from an administrative point of view. Typical examples are administrative functions for the batch processing of course bookings, interfaces for credit card-supported accounting systems and the standardisation of course curriculums and learning paths, usually in order to provide user groups with easy access to the learning content.
Technical scalability requirements
From a technical point of view, user numbers of over 1 million represent difficult scaling challenges for the LMS, which can fundamentally be achieved by expanding the hardware infrastructure. It is ultimately in the interests of the customer to keep transaction costs as low as possible while simultaneously providing the highest level of accessibility.
In addition, this also implies that the application will not only include shared data management and operations, but also the vertically scaled hardware resources which are available today. A software design is therefore required which is able to accommodate constantly-growing numbers of users and can deal with the required expansions for both hardware and software during ongoing operations, without the basic system architecture needing to be changed.
Finally, the careful selection of other types of technology required for operation, such as databases, application servers and web servers is also of decisive importance. These technologies must be robust, reliable and suitable for unproblematic integration. Due to the high user numbers, the LMS must simultaneously be able to make use of optimisation options which basic technology already offers within many companies, to guarantee performance and low response times.
