Alex Little

 I attended the recent Unfold CoP meeting in Glasgow which was very useful – all the presentations etc are available via the Unfold project website. The most useful parts for me were….

• We (well actually Patrick & Diane) ran a workshop on our Sled player, which seemed to go well, though we had a few problems with the responsiveness of our Sled demo site (more about that later!!)
• I presented some of the work I’ve been doing with the integration of external services into LD, eg how we did the QTI integration and the problems we had in using the same methodology to integrate ePortfolio.
• James Dalziel’s presentation on the updates they’ve been working on for LAMS, and the new release that is due out soon, with the ability to be able to write your own tools to plug into the LAMS interface. Would like to get chance to explore and have a look at what they’ve done in more detail
• Scott Wilson’s presentation which gave much more detail on the tools integration method used by LAMS – I think it’s a really good start at being able to connect up different service providers, but it’s not quite a ”plug and play” type of methodology just yet !
• Mark Barrett-Baxendale’s presentation on their real life use of learning design on actual students at Liverpool Hope University – where they are making use of CopperCore engine and the Sled player

One thing that did come up were some performance issues that we’ve not been able to resolve yet and we’re not yet sure of the actual cause, if it’s the Sled player, CopperCore engine or something else. When we were running the workshop we found that having 15 or more people connecting to our demo system at the same time slowed the system down to a crawl – making it almost unusable. I thought that this may be due to the fact that it’s just running on a desktop machine and we’re only using the default database, rather than upgrading to MSSQL or PostgreSQL and that upgrading the database or putting it on a bigger machine would solve the problem. However , when Mark presented their work at Liverpool Hope Uni, they are also having performance problems if they have a whole class of students accessing the system at the same time. There, they already have upgraded the database to PostgreSQL and are running it on a ‘proper’ server.

So, I’m not sure where the problem lies, whether its the Sled player, or CopperCore, but to help try and track down the problem I’m going to find a load testing tool and run it against an installation of Sled and the CopperCore player on one of our servers and see what happens. Finding what the problem is will probably be the easy part though – going to be more difficult to figure out what to do about it!

After I’ve spent a bit of time looking at this performance stuff, I’ll then get back to what I’m meant to be doing for the JISC toolkit and demonstrator projects as I still have quite a few bits to finish off for these, and need todecide what the priorities are for the last couple of weeks.