Quick, we’ve run out of paper!

‘Quick, we’ve run out of paper!’

On Thursday the 29 September 2016 our classroom woes went from ‘We have run out of paper!’ to ‘I can’t click this button to get started on the online quiz!’ It was at this point that we had the realisation that we are truly moving into a new era of the classroom.

One of the items we [AdvantageLearn.com] are trying to drive is an apparent shift towards integrating technology into our educational practice. This is no small task, and we are acutely aware of the challenges that we must face to make sure we move our students into a new era of learning. One that is fundamentally different to that which most of us have experienced. Blended learning is here, and it is here to stay, however, it does not come without its challenges!

On Thursday last week we ran into one of those challenges.

In the past, we have made our AP Maths students do their online quizzes on different days which ensured that we didn’t have too much load on our support staff and hardware. This year we made the decision to scale our approach, ensuring the technology is forced into a position of serving the educators and learners alike. Although this may seem bold, we believe it to be necessary, both from a pedagogical and a commercial standpoint. On Thursday our eager Advanced Programme Mathematics Grade 10 and 11 students hit their ‘desks’ to begin their required online quiz only to be faced with issues logging into their quiz. Some got in without a problem, yet others ran into significant issues.

This post serves to log the issue and create awareness around what we ran into last week so you, our valued customers and in many ways, trailblazers, are kept informed and abreast (should you want to be) of the issues and solutions we put in place. We are a team that believes in transparency and accountability and so it is an essential step for our tech team to outline issues and propose solutions therein. May this post be the starting point of much more.

Issue Log – The Cause:

The issue was the result of an overload of ajax calls to our server via the support widget and the live chat widget. In a nutshell, this caused the server to block certain requests and allow others when there was capacity. Hence the reason some students could log into the online quiz and others could not.

Issue Log – The hotfix:

While this issue was hot we had to come up with some solutions to reduce the load on the server very quickly.

What we couldn’t do:

1. Unfortunately, upgrading the performance of the server there and then was not possible due to our host’s limitations (we are not running on AWS or Google Cloud whereby CPU can be added on the fly).
2. Taking the site into maintenance mode to lower the quiz ajax call requests config was not possible because some learners were already live in their quizzes.

This left us with not many options, so we decided the following approach…

What we did do:

1. Make a hotfix production change to the ZOPIM (Instant Messenger) to lower the increasing ajax load from our support desk.
2. Open the quiz timelines to ensure that the load naturally decreases.

This solved the issue in the interim.

Future preventative measures:

1. Refactor the quiz code only to send ajax requests after 3 – 5 seconds instead of on the second. Not ideal for a real time timer but necessary for optimization. {This optimization has been made and pushed to production}
2. Increase the server CPU capacity. {in progress with our hosts}
3. Move forward on load testing scripts to trial scenarios – something that has been high on our list of future innovations as our customer base grows.

And so, in conclusion, we are extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused. As we push the boundaries of blended learning we know that we will run into issues like this but we still aim to prevent them and so when they do happen, and our learners are adversely affected, then we take it very seriously.

**Comments are open on this post; please feel free to ask me any questions regarding this issue.