Thread:Open development, design and support (2)

Hi Irwin,

Thanks again for the overall blueprint review and these reflections. Extremely valuable in helping us clarify our designs and understand the constraints.

Copy of responses posted on OERu planning list

Scale

Scalability is a big issue for the future of OERu. From a design perspective designing for scale still gives us the flexibility to cap participation at an institutional level. However, a course which is designed for a small number of students is very hard to scale up for thousands.

There are also technology issues. For example, many learning management systems tend to use considerable computing resources as they are not designed for scale. So for example, if in the future, an OERu webinar was streamed simultaneously to thousands of users and the presenter asks participants to all look at the discussion thread for topic 2, there is a real risk of crashing the servers -- because these technologies are not necessarily designed for scale. So behind the scenes we also need to think about the technology infrastructure and how to distribute the computing resources across the network in an affordable way. Fortunately --administering a large global community like WIkiEducator means we have the benefit of experience have learned what works and likely to be risky.