#laravellms

[laravellms]

How to Scale your online training platform without compromise?

A excellent place to start is by making an investment in a learning management system (LMS) as your centralized database for data regarding staff training. Having an LMS will allow you to organize all of this critical institutional knowledge rather than depending on dispersed documents, slide presentations, blogs, mind maps, and meetings to keep everyone in the loop. Moreover, using a collaborative learning technique will enable you to quickly, efficiently, and engagingly teach your staff.

What is scalability?

An e-learning platform with scalable LMS capabilities can expand to suit your changing user and company needs. An online Laravel learning management System that can accommodate more users, more content, and more requests without degrading loading times, experiencing severe issues, or facing impairing downtime.

Learning management systems can only be scaled in a select few situations. However, in the majority of cases, you'd have to design a new LMS from the ground up with scalability in mind.

Why is it necessary for my LMS to be scalable?

There are multiple reasons why an organization would require a scalable LMS. The first and most obvious reason is that you do not want to build or invest in an LMS that cannot scale with your business or user base. If your LMS is preventing you from scaling, you should seriously examine some of the choices listed below.

Finally, a scalable LMS allows you to:

Handle a large amount of data and multiple requests at the same time

Make your educational materials available to millions of users (including high-levels of concurrent users)

Organize your people in bulk and easily control enrollments, permissions, and courses.

Provide a user-friendly experience with great performance and quick load times.

Can I scale my LMS to keep up with the growth of my company?

The technology used by your existing LMS determines whether or not it can scale. Expect a significant increase in your monthly or annual bill, which can often make growing more expensive than necessary. Scaling up a SaaS solution is not always financially feasible, especially when users are rarely active, such as for annual compliance training, where the seat remains empty for 99% of the year.

Off-the-shelf platforms typically charge excessive monthly or annual costs based on the number of active users, the number of courses, and even the size of the assets you upload. 

If you already have an LMS on an open-source platform, such as WordPress, LearnDash, Drupal, Opigno, or Open edX, and the right specialists, you can scale using the suggestions below (though some of those technologies have severe limitations to their scale - read on to find out which don't scale quite as well). You may need to rebuild your hosting infrastructure or replace large plugins/modules with custom-built versions, but it's a minor price to pay to offer your learning management system the scalability and flexibility your company requires as it grows.

How can I expand my LMS?

When it comes to growing your elearning platform, you have several possibilities. In any case, scaling is frequently possible and will almost definitely address legacy issues that have been a problem for your company for some time. This investment in your LMS will provide you with endless earning opportunities in the future.

Choose the right platform (and agency) from the beginning

As we discussed in the last section, you may be limited by your current LMS vendor, which can limit your scale. We have a pay once, use forever philosophy at LMS Monks, which means the system is yours to use and customise as you see fit, and you are not restricted or tied to us in any way - however, not all agencies and suppliers share this mindset.

Other alternatives may have the same limitations:

Your company's pricing model

Their developers' ability

The ability to customize their solution

Their codebase's incompatibility with other platforms

Inability to extend features (if they are closed-source)

The costs of improving

These are all things to consider when selecting a platform, whether it is pre-built or not. Choose to develop a scalable LMS on open source technology that gives you complete control for the most flexibility at the lowest cost.

Identify the suitable hosting infrastructure.

An LMS is only as scalable as the infrastructure it is hosted on, hence it is crucial to get the hosting infrastructure right.

There is no one-size-fits-all option for LMS hosting. Two learning management systems designed on the same architecture may require quite different hosting infrastructures based on their scale, the formats of your material, the reliability of your future growth, and a variety of other variables.

Your chosen LMS supplier should collaborate with you to plan and implement the infrastructure required to scale.

Enhance the site's performance.

When user numbers are growing, one of the most significant issues your LMS can confront is site speed. A slow site will affect both your users and system administrators, resulting in complaints from both internal teams and paying clients. As a result, courses may be left unfinished as users become dissatisfied and drop out, while support staff struggle to diagnose and resolve difficulties quickly enough, significantly hurting your learners.

Improving your LMS speed is critical for expanding your current elearning platform to accommodate more users. Assuming you are not a developer, you will require help to complete this task.

Rebuild your template files, taking care to limit the number of requests needed to load a page.

To distribute the load, separate your marketing website from your LMS if they are linked.

Reduce the number of database calls by minifying HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Compress picture sizes, limit high-resolution imagery, and utilise SVGs where applicable to ensure that they load quickly.

Lazy loading ensures that only onscreen media is loaded.

Use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce server demand when delivering media.

External video hosting

Wherever possible, automate

As your user base expands, so will the demand on your administrative staff, which raises your operating costs, introduces human error, and causes excessive wait times for activities to be accomplished.

So, when scaling an LMS, it's critical to manage your time and skills properly, which involves transferring administrative work to automation.

Some frequent automatable tasks include:

Allow the organisations with whom you collaborate to control their own users.

Completely automate the purchasing process, including single-course and multi-seat transactions.

Integrated reporting allows your staff and clients to create their own reports in formats that are relevant to your industry.

Send out messages and reminders to keep students engaged.

Enroll new users and unregister old ones

Help customers with common support issues.

What if you need to scale your LMS right away?

It's time to communicate. We provide advice, design, and development services, as well as a thorough Needs Analysis for projects that need to be defined or don't yet have a technical build strategy. Contact us right away.