The idea behind online learning and e-Learning, is to utilize technology to engage learners with course material in more dynamic and interactive ways, than in a face to face classroom. Modern online courses are created in a rich and dynamic way and often incorporate elements such as rich video production, audio narration, flash animation, interactive learning games and more.
While this trend of dynamic and engaging online courses results in beautiful, fun and effective online courses, which can be imported into Moodle and delivered to students and tracked, the process doesn’t come without its share of pitfalls.
One of these pitfalls, is the amount of bandwidth and server space that is often required to properly host rich media content within a Moodle course. Videos, flash files and large pictures can often take up large chunks of space on a server. This can cause problems for both organizations and their learners. Slow loading times and system downtime can disrupt the learning process for students and in order to fix the problem, additional servers for dedicated Moodle hosting may be required, which can become very costly!
So, what’s the Alternative?
In order to eliminate slow loading times and increase system uptime for our clients’ media-heavy Moodle courses, we’ve recently added a Content Distribution Network (CDN) option to our existing Lambda Solutions Moodle hosting plans.
The Content Distribution Network, also known as a Content Delivery Network (CDN), is a method of hosting, intended for organizations with very large and media-heavy Moodle courses. A Content Distribution Network (CDN) is designed to accelerate slow loading times, for media-heavy content, such as videos, flash movies, learning games and large picture files.
With the Content Distribution Network, media-heavy elements in your course are cached across several super-servers located in 17 cities and 2 continents. Each time one of your learners accesses a media element, the CDN retrieves it from the server that’s geographically closest to them. The result is much faster loading and delivery times for your media.
Adding a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to your existing Moodle hosting plan, will allow you to differentiate between how your Moodle is hosted and how the more media-heavy elements of your course are hosted. Your Moodle would still be hosted on our servers, via your choice of a a shared, virtual or dedicated Moodle hosting server. Your media, however, is hosted separately, using larger and more powerful super-servers.
The result is is an online course that is free of disruption for your learners and does not require a huge price tag in order to be hosted properly!
