The NOSE

Minnesota State Colleges & Universities LMS (D2L) System Statistics

Minnesota State Colleges & Universities, which comprises 32 public higher education institutions in the state of Minnesota, supports one of the largest Learning Management System (LMS) environments in higher education.

In enterprise IT-land Fall startup is an exciting and anxious time: we welcome a new class of eager students and put to the test our summer preparations.

Will our systems withstand peak load and continuing growth, particularly in e-Learning and e-Services?

Once again our Desire2Learn LMS held up to massive load during Fall Startup. As the chart above shows, during the first day of classes we had 284,600 logins, approximately a 38% increase from last year. Of the more than a quarter million logins, 86,511 were distinct users.

An important story behind the numbers is that despite continuing declamations that the LMS is "dead", our statistics show that increasingly faculty and students rely on the LMS as the basic electronic tool for teaching and learning.  What mainstream faculty and students seem to want above all else is stability, reliability, and predictability. On that front I am also pleased to report that for the past eighteen months our availability has held steady at about 99.98%, which translates into less than 2 hours of downtime per year.

Online Headcount Growth - Minnesota State Colleges & Universities

Here's a chart showing our growth (Minnesota State Colleges & Universities) in online headcount from FY'2004 to FY'2009 (projected). I am very proud of my team that supports the underlying enterprise technology and infrastructure, which at the core is the Desire2Learn Learning Management System.

Last calendar year our uptime for the system, which supports more than just online students, was 99.98%. 

Desire2Learn Holds Up Under Severe Load

It has been a busy summer on the IT front. Now that classes are underway I expect to begin blogging again more consistently.

My team at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities spent considerable time this summer upgrading our Desire2Learn (our Learning Management System) environment to v8.3 and then preparing for the full onslaught of fall startup. The upgrade to v8.3 went smoothly earlier in the summer. This is the first year in which all 32 MnSCU institutions started term on the same date (8/25/2008).

Since we support one of the largest eLearning environments in the country, if not the world, the prospects of a common start date and a new version of the D2L software became a great source of anxiety for me and my team. We shored up all the levees and then checked and rechecked everything that we could think of. We also put in new management and communication protocols,, modeled on NIMS, for handling emergency incidents and crises. The Desire2Learn team, including CEO John Baker, did everything possible to ensure success.

Fall startup of our D2L has gone very smoothly thus far and we have broken all kinds of records for scalability and performance. First day of classes our login count was 222,053 users. Our page hits on the first day was nearly 30 million, 36% more than our previous record. System load included computationally intensive functions and not just static page views.

All in all the system has held up remarkably well under severe load and we are very happy, indeed. Best of all our customers, particularly Faculty, are very happy that Fall startup went so smoothly.

Lessons Learned: Treat Fall Startup as a separate Project. Plan, Plan, Plan. It pays off.