On 24 May, 2017, the one-day access traffic of the learning platform (http://www.ouchn.cn/) of the Open University of China (OUC) leapt from 300G to 700G. Over the next ten days, the daily traffic once again climbed to a peak, exceeding 1T.

What was the reason behind this extraordinary jump? Work on the OUC Learning Platform began in 2012. It was put into trial operation in the autumn of 2013 and was put into comprehensive operation in 2015. After several rounds of improvement and optimisation, the learning platform has made stable progress and achieved initial results.

Developing R&D activities in China and abroad

At the end of 2012, in order to adapt to new learning needs and the development of information technology, and on the basis of a comprehensive evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of the original open learning platform, the OUC began to build a new learning platform.

On the basis of investigating the construction of learning platforms in foreign leading open universities and integrating them into its technology path selection, the OUC finally chose to build a learning platform based on the open source platform. After identifying the construction path, we investigated the mainstream open source platforms in the distance education field at the time, compared open source platforms such as saki and moodle, and finally decided to refer to moodle.

In May 2013, the OUC introduced the official partner of the moodle platform, Cuckoo company in Australia, and set up a learning platform project team with its Information Technology Department. After nearly four months of design, development, testing, and work deployment, the learning platform was put online for a test run during the 2013 autumn semester. Since then, with the continuous improvement of the learning platform, the scale of the pilot has gradually expanded and the platform was put into use during the 2015 autumn semester.

Cloud computing technology was adopted on the new learning platform. At first, the OUC deployed the applications from China Telecom’s cloud computing centre in Beijing. All data is stored in the centre, which supports teachers and students in the OUC system to access the learning platform via computer system, mobile phone, tablet computer, and other terminals. By this means, a well-grounded technical architecture of "Cloud, Path, and Terminal” was established. In autumn 2016, the learning platform was moved to Ali Cloud, improving its deployment structure, optimising the database, and upgrading the learning platform. It was reported that after the upgrade, the functions and performance of the learning platform have greatly improved, including operating speed, reliability, security, and stability. Network access was no longer interrupted and the user experience was greatly enhanced.

Comprehensively exploring integration

The OUC’s Moodle learning platform integrates both “unity and differentiation” and has the following characteristics:

One-stop integrated teaching experience: With the transformation of the “three-level platform" into a “one-level platform,” teachers and students can complete all teaching and learning links with only a set of user name and passwords, creating a one-stop, integrated teaching experience for both teachers and students.

Full support throughout the teaching process: The platform can not only show teaching resources and materials in various formats, it can also provide various different teaching activities so that students can interact with teachers, classmates, and teaching resources.

Improved progress management and reminders. The platform provides progress management and progress displays for curriculum teaching, which helps teachers track their students’ learning and helps students get a clear picture of their progress.

Combination of rigid requirements and flexibility. Considering the need for hierarchical management among the branches, some freedom was given to each department so that they can adjust measures according to local conditions, flexibly organise, and adjust the teaching curriculum.

Comprehensive teaching process monitoring. Unified scheduling and use of the resources and data obtained during the teaching process makes it convenient for the headquarters to control system operations in real time and monitor the teaching process of all the branches.

Open and extensible. The platform can be upgraded using the official open source version to get new features and plug-ins provided by the new version.

Steady development shows initial outcomes

Since the platform was put into trial operation in autumn 2013, the learning platform’s 251 courses have been clicked on 31.89 million times. After full operation and platform upgrading, the click rate has reached 853.38 million for the 927 courses, an increase of nearly 10 times. At the same time, the rate of access is increasing rapidly and the use rate of the learning platform has steadily improved.

The total daily traffic flow of the learning platform increased from 25G in 2016 to 115G in just two months and shows an overall slowly rising trend. From that point on, daily traffic at first decreased slowly and then took a steep upward trend. From autumn 2016 to spring 2017, daily traffic declined but soared again from the beginning of March 2017. On 24th May, the OUC Learning Platform saw a great leap from 300G to 700G in a single day. Over the next ten days, daily traffic jumped again to 1,228G.

Written by Xue Jiayi, Edited by Yan Jingzhen, E-Learning