Home | Technology & Management Consulting | E-Learning | ActiveLearning SaaS Advantage

ActiveLearning SaaS Advantage

09 November, 2011 09:45:00

Font size:

Learning institutions of all types — colleges, universities, companies, government agencies — must ensure they establish a technological foundation capable of growing seamlessly alongside their online programs. That’s why we’ve designed ActiveLearning as a Software- as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.

By 2015, 25 million post- secondary students in the United States will be taking classes online, according to market research firm Ambient Insight. Further, according to the report, "If this trend continues, by 2018, there will be more full time online students than students that take all their classes in a physical classroom."

Why SaaS?

SaaS is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service-on-demand. These applications are then accessed via the Internet or "cloud" by any number of web-enabled devices. By leveraging a SaaS architecture, we enable you to deliver reliable, secure access to online education whenever and wherever your learners choose.

The Advantages of SaaS in Higher Education

“Time magazine reports the states collectively will face a $55 billion budget shortfall in 2011, with 31 of the 50 states expecting a budget deficit of at least 10 percent.”

Today’s recessionary environment is driving higher education administrators to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to bridge the gap between escalating demand for IT services and shrinking budgets. SaaS solutions offer a substantive alternative to the costly, inflexible and cumbersome legacy applications. Now more than ever, higher education institutions, with fewer dollars to spend are looking for smarter ways to deliver and expand the benefits of technology to campuses. In fact, Time magazine reports the states collectively will face a $55 billion budget shortfall in 2011, with 31 of the 50 states expecting a budget deficit of at least 10 percent. The likely cutbacks will leave few government services untouched–resulting in larger class sizes, laid-off faculty, and hiring freezes in state universities. Fewer hires means each employee is tasked with more work and has less time to communicate with other departments. With limited resources to physically expand classrooms and buildings, online courses may be the only strategic way for colleges and universities to grow.

Unlike traditional software, a SaaS solution eliminates the need for additional in-house efforts and costs associated with buying hardware, installing and configuring software, and training and supporting users. At our company, we take care of these issues.

Don’t Confuse SaaS with Hosting

It is important not to confuse SaaS with hosting. Hosting is a 1990’s way to outsource the operation of your computers to a service provider or doing it yourself internally. SaaS/cloud provisioning is using a central, large Internet-scale installation that provides the ability to rapidly scale, and embrace new technologies to maintain unprecedented uptime. Moreover, speed of development is also a huge advantage with SaaS. Having to deploy on one central infrastructure makes your service development faster, simpler, more efficient, and reliable.

ActiveLearning – A Proven, SaaS Learning Management System

Online programs are only as effective as the technology they’re built upon. With ActiveLearning, customers have a single, powerful, always up, single maintainable infrastructure that enables rapid, large scale deployment. The inherent advantages of SaaS assures the long-term growth and evolution of online learning environments, while reducing costs associated with hardware installations, software licenses, system maintenance, storage and upgrades.

Serving more than a million students around the globe, ActiveLearning provides a comprehensive learning management system with an assessment and analytics suite that helps to improve student achievement and retention. The technology offers a personalized learning environment built on an advanced, scalable and dependable Software-as a-Service platform.

The following table outline the advantages of the full-service ActiveLearning learning management system vs. a non-SaaS / hosted solution.

ActiveLearning	Non SaaS / Hosted Solution
Size
We deploy ActiveLearning as a single instance at high scale and high intensity.	Deployed as small instances on a small sale with low intensity. These are independent and run separately.
With ActiveLearning, customers have large capacity and a central, large Internet-scaled, single maintainable infrastructure that enables rapid, large scale deployment. ActiveLearning runs its service like Amazon, Google and Salesforce. It’s always up and it’s up for all customers. That’s why ActiveLearning can run at the level of uptime that we can run. The platform serves millions of users per day and provides millions of minutes of contact per day.	Customers easily run out of capacity. Service goes down for individual customers very often, and it stays down for a long time because in order to fix it, the service provider has to fix multiple particular instances. Since one particular system failure doesn’t affect other customers, there’s no imperative to fix your system right away when it goes down.
Speed
Speed of development is a huge advantage with ActiveLearning. Having to deploy on one central SaaS- based infrastructure makes your service development faster, simpler, more efficient, and reliable.	Deployed on hundreds of little tiny instances, which means progress is slower and it’s difficult to make your service reliable.
Our software engineers and state-of-the-art data center provide mission-critical services and support, including extensive help desk support, software upgrades and maintenance, reliability (99.99 percent up-time), scalability, security, and disaster recovery. As a result, ActiveLearning ensures the long-term growth of customer’s online learning programs.	Requires institutions to manage their own service and support, including limited capacity for student/faculty help desk support. Institutions must also manage their own storage capacity, security, scalability and disaster recovery.
ActiveLearning open API makes it easy to interconnect with other platforms, such as student information systems and other learning management systems.	Requires institution’s IT staff to build connectivity with other systems and platforms.
Support
ActiveLearning requires little to no IT staffing and support by the customer. We supply the hardware, storage, software and networking needed to power a successful teaching and learning environment.	Requires institutions to manage their own hardware, software, storage and networking needs.
ActiveLearning frees up customer’s IT staff to shift their focus away from day-to-day IT maintenance issues to more strategic IT-related decision-making processes.	Requires institution’s IT staff to spend more time and resources on day-to-day system maintenance and support.
Services
Our software engineers and state-of-the-art data center provide mission-critical services and support, including extensive help desk support, software upgrades and maintenance, reliability (99.99 percent up-time), scalability, security, and disaster recovery. As a result, ActiveLearning ensures the long-term growth of customer’s online learning programs.	Requires institutions to manage their own service and support, including limited capacity for student/faculty help desk support. Institutions must also manage their own storage capacity, security, scalability and disaster recovery.
ActiveLearning is a full service solution, which means customers pay one fee for all expenses.	Generally requires unplanned, ongoing expenses for upgrades, interconnectivity, equipment costs, etc.

Add to: Add to your del.icio.us

del.icio.us | Digg this story

Digg