[Using Sakai] Largest Site Membership / Potential Tool Issues?

[Arlow, Magdaleen]

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Dear Jacob

At Unisa (University of South Africa) we have a number of sites with more than 1000 students. Unisa is a distance teaching institution and have courses with more than 10 000 enrolled students, but not all are working online. Our general problem is the tools where the first option is to list the participants or students, ant that takes a long time or is unpractical for large numbers. We prefer the option where a specific user number/code can be entered for display.

We are still running Sakai 2.5.x, so some problems may have improvements we have not implemented yet; but here are the tools where we experience problems :

-          Blogger : slow for large classes; get problems/bugs

-          Dropbox: finding a specific box without a search on  the page or re-ordering option

-          Sign up: lecturers’ view is slow with the view of participants

-          Samigo: download of scores because of default view

-          Site Info : default view extract all participants; slow for adding new participants on large sites

-          Sitestats : resources view; reports for many events

Our student numbers remain a criteria when choosing tools to use at Unisa. We are preparing a report  on our large site experience, an overdue promise to Sakai community. We’ll  send it to you when completed.

Kind regards

Magdaleen Arlow

Deputy-Director : Academic Systems
Applications and Solutions Directorate
ICT Department
[cid:image001.png at 01CABFDB.92CAAEA0]

' +27 (0) 12 429 3102
Cell + 27 (0) 82 783 9163

Email : arlowm at unisa.ac.za



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From: sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Jacob Reinelt
Sent: 08 March 2010 06:42 PM
To: sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
Subject: [Using Sakai] Largest Site Membership / Potential Tool Issues?

Hello all,

I've recently been engaged in a discussion regarding if there are any limits on what the maximum number of members in one site is with tools still functioning properly. Since I don't have much experience with sites that have 1000+ members, and would prefer to get more information than just informing them that the sky is the theoretical limit, I am curious as to what the largest site membership is at institutions and if they have encountered issues with any tools due to member size.

Currently our largest non-academic course has 2887 members. The only tool that we've flagged to this point with that level of membership is the roster tool. We haven't had any issues with the chat tool but generally our larger non-academic courses don't have the chat tool active or don't have a membership that actively utilizes the chat tool in mass. Are there any tools that people have discovered which become impacted, potentially severely, at 5000, 10000, 15000 etc users?

I understand that different institution set-ups can skewer when / if issues occur but it would be nice to have an idea of any issues we may encounter as we see larger site memberships,

Jacob Reinelt

Open Source Programmer/Analyst
Saginaw Valley State University
Zahnow 202-A
jjreinel at svsu.edu
(989) 964-2151
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