CourseWork, Stanford's course management system, has gained tremendous popularity since it was released in January 2001. In the first two weeks of Fall Quarter 2004, the number of courses using CourseWork increased by 22 percent compared to the number of courses using CourseWork in Fall Quarter of the previous year.
New features to improve service, a long term solution to keep CourseWork running effectively, along with Stanford's recently-formed Course Management Systems Advisory Council will help provide Stanford faculty and students with a course management system to meet their needs.
New Features
The increased use of CourseWork has led to a growing challenge to maintain good service levels to users. Several new features and enhancements have recently been deployed to improve service when the system is experiencing heavy use:
- A significant improvement was made to the existing load balancer to improve the assignment of users to a server with the lowest load.
- The database capacity has been upgraded.
- A throttle mechanism has been implemented to limit the number of simultaneous users logged in to CourseWork.
- A system indicator has also been added to the CourseWork login page. The system indicator dynamically changes color to reflect system load. Green designates a low to moderate load, orange designates a heavy load, and red designates a full load. Once a full load has been reached, no users will be able to log in until the load on the system has been reduced. Placing a limit on the number of simultaneous users was necessary to prevent the system instabilities that were experienced at the beginning of Fall Quarter.
Long-Term Solution
Load balancing, increasing hardware capacity and limiting the number of concurrent user sessions are only short-term solutions. A long-term solution requires replacement of the CourseWork core code which was written in the mid-1990s. This is necessary to rectify obsolete and increasingly unsupportable technology, enhance stability, and allow scalability as usage continues to grow. CourseWork Next Generation (aka Sakai) is currently under development as a collaborative effort among Stanford, University of Michigan, Indiana University, and MIT. This new version of CourseWork will be developed using current technology and standards that will allow better stability, scalability and interoperability with other campus systems.
Course Management Systems Advisory Group
Recognizing the growing importance of course management systems like CourseWork to instruction at Stanford, a Course Management Systems (CMS) Advisory Council was appointed last Spring by the Provost, John Etchemendy, and the University Librarian, Michael Keller. Professor Chris Chidsey, Department of Chemistry, currently chairs the CMS Advisory Council. Chidsey commented on the challenges of maintaining adequate service at peak times:
"It can certainly be frustrating to find access to CourseWork blocked, but it is better that those who are on the system can get their work done and get off, rather than having the system bog down trying to handle too many users at once and serving none of them well. Luckily, throttling has been a relatively rare event. The CMS Advisory Council supports the recent efforts SULAIR has taken to better handle the growing load on the current system, and we are actively working with SULAIR to help define what will be needed for an efficient and successful rollout of the new system."
For more information on CourseWork Next Generation or to express an interest in piloting and testing parts of the new system, please email Makoto Tsuchitani, Head of Faculty Services, mako@stanford.edu.
For More Information
See also Doctoral Student Using CourseWork in Unexpected Ways in this issue. For more information about CourseWork see the web at:
