University of South Africa (UNISA) is the largest university in the country and on the African continent with more than 370,000 students across 110 countries registered in one academic year. UNISA migrated from SAKAI to Moodle (Learning Management System – LMS) to support the Comprehensive Open Distance e-Learning (CODeL) Blueprint implementation and in pursuit of its 2030 Vision, Digital Fluidity. The implementation resulted in uncertainty and frustration, often characterised with incidents of system instability that hampered teaching and learning. For an LMS of Moodle’s magnitude, it is imperative that UNISA’s ability to handle a large number of users concurrently and optimally be guaranteed.
UNISA’s Moodle environment architecture, hosted on Microsoft Azure (MS Azure), lacked dynamic scalability, leading to performance issues during peak usage times. This presentation details the interventions undertaken for improvement.
The interventions addressed some concerns by optimizing the database, its infrastructure and implementing a high-availability (HA) solution with MaxScale and database cluster. Additionally, a Redis cache store was configured to improve application responsiveness.
Overall, while significant progress has been made in stabilizing the LMS environment, achieving complete reliability and scalability remains a work in progress. Further interventions and potential platform migration are being considered to ensure a consistently positive user experience for students and academics.
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