Preparations for August 2013 Online Training System

This past August during the peak season of traffic to our online training system (http://training2.aea11.k12.ia.us), many users experienced a delay in website load time. In fact, a few days saw the average load time for a page at over 30 seconds. The reason for these delays was an unexpected 125% increase in the number of people taking online trainings. In order to make the make the user experience better, we have come up with a series of solutions and recommendations.

Our solutions for 2013
To solve the issue in August 2012, we instituted a “maximum concurrent users = 100” policy. Immediately doing so, the performance level improved to normal. For 2013 we will be keeping a concurrent user cap, but we will be raising it as we make some other changes.

The biggest change we are making is distributing the training system over many different servers. This should allow more processing power for our system. We are also looking at re-optimizing our server software to see if we can minimize the load an individual user has. We will be testing this new environment this winter with some pilot schools. We are confident that we will have a successfully working system next August.

Our recommendations for 2013
While these changes will help, with the additional trainings we will be adding, we could see numbers double again. Therefore, we have some suggestions for districts to make the experience better for their employees.

1. Encourage employees to take trainings earlier. If your district sends out a welcome-back to school letter in July to employees, encourage them then to take the trainings. July is a down time for usage of the server, so the chances of hitting that cap are very small.

2. If you are having staff complete the training in August, avoid the heavy usage dates. To the right, you can see our projected usage chart for next August, the darker the color, the heavier the usage.
 
3. Avoid having your entire staff take the training at once. While this practice might be very convenient for the planning of pre-service days, it also greatly enhances your chances of hitting the cap, meaning some will be logged into the site and some will not. Plus, all the individuals from your school accessing the same training could impact your own district bandwidth, slowing down the experience as well.

4. Target district inservice days. Waiting until your first early-out can save a lot of frustration for your teachers. Do take note that many districts use Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as an inservice day, and we see a spike of usage on that day as well.