Saylor Academy is a nonprofit organization that aims to democratize education by offering online courses at the university and professional levels accessible to learners worldwide.
Key Needs and Challenges
With an increasing demand of use, Saylor Academy’s goal was to ensure long term sustainability as they scale up. Improving system performance was also a top priority. Saylor needed a technical partner that would help with that and provide long-term support and efficiencies. This would allow them to focus entirely on their education strategy and on delivering quality educational content.
Saylor’s unique open education model posed some specific technical demands. The new platform needed to:
- support a high volume of anonymous traffic without compromising speed or stability
- have optimized performance for learners wherever they may be learning
- support their evolving digital learning environment
To address these needs, Saylor partnered with Catalyst Canada to migrate their Moodle environment to Catalyst’s fully-managed hosting service.
Findings and Solutions
Catalyst Canada worked closely with Saylor to perform a seamless migration from the existing environment to a Catalyst-hosted and managed Moodle environment. Key elements of the project included:
- Infrastructure Management: Catalyst Canada took full ownership of the hosting infrastructure, ensuring high availability, scalability, and performance monitoring.
- Plugin and Performance Optimization: Prior to the migration, Saylor was experiencing slowness with some of their queries, causing timeout issues and failing tasks. The Catalyst team investigated the root cause of the issue and conducted fixes that would optimize the platform.
After analyses and optimizations of Moodle plugins, Saylor now benefits from a streamlined performance that is compatible with their needs. - Collaborative Support: Catalyst Canada’s support team played a critical role in the transition between Moodle environments by offering proactive recommendations and alternative approaches throughout the process.
Results
- Improved site performance: Saylor now benefits from a faster, more responsive platform capable of handling global demand.
- Operational focus: With Catalyst managing the technical aspects and infrastructure, Saylor can now fully concentrate on delivering high quality academic content.
- Ongoing support: Saylor can have peace of mind that they will receive the assistance they need with Catalyst’s 24/7 Follow the Sun support model.
- Strong foundation for future innovations and scalability: Saylor
can now focus on future growth and creating an impact in the field
of education. - Long term efficiencies: Saylor will benefit from long term efficiencies given the scalability of Catalyst Moodle environment on AWS, and Catalyst’s extensive experience in managing large Moodle instances
We are excited to partner with Catalyst to help expand our reach to learners around the world. Their expertise will help us scale to new heights and better serve our students as we work to improve the learning experience.
The successful migration of Saylor Academy’s Moodle platform to Catalyst’s managed services represents more than a technical achievement.
By taking full responsibility for technical requirements, Catalyst will enable Saylor Academy to allocate more time to working towards their mission and other strategic priorities.
Catalyst is proud to support Saylor Academy in their mission of transforming lives through accessible learning and democratising education.
Looking to scale your Moodle LMS?
With over 15 years of experience, Catalyst IT has experience and in-depth knowledge of optimising enterprise-level Moodle learning management systems, whether on premise or in a cloud hosted environment. Let’s explore how we can help you.
