By Monique Lucey
An increasing number of higher education institutions are noticing the appeal of virtual learning environments (VLE), where students have flexible access to classes, coursework, faculty and supplementary materials. However, they might not be as aware of the toll these projects can take on IT infrastructure and resources.
Students, teachers and staff expect anytime, anywhere access to VLEs, including from potentially unsecured home and mobile networks. They require the platform and infrastructure to feature high performance and high availability at all times. And they take for granted that the information downloaded, posted, exchanged and stored will be protected.
At the same time, the parameters of what constitutes a VLE are constantly changing. Some VLEs have HD components, such as videoconferencing, that can be incredibly draining to network resources if not monitored closely. Others use social networking to share information, which must be managed to comply with government privacy mandates.
To ensure that all bases are covered with VLEs and that users are getting the highest quality of access to learning, higher education institutions should bring IT to the table early on in their VLE deployment discussions. That way, VLE stakeholders can have a proactive discussion about the capacity, compliance, management, security and storage needs that comprise a sound VLE strategy.
As an example, to guarantee that VLE users can’t get into unauthorized areas of the system, IT can work with VLE administrators to establish user and group access policies. They can map those policies to government and university guidelines. Centralized management tools enable IT to automatically dispatch, deploy, update and enforce these policies to all endpoints. In addition, with centralized management tools, IT can run reports and handle audits to prove compliance.
IT also successfully impacts the resiliency of the VLE environment by studying spikes in usage through centralized network management and optimizing network resources accordingly. If a professor posts a new HD video lecture, IT can make sure that the server and network bandwidth are capable of handling increased user access without negatively affecting the rest of the network.
Finally, IT will be the key to benchmarking VLE success. Using centralized network management, IT can chart how often users are accessing the VLE and what components they are finding most effective. They can also alert stakeholders to growing pains and expand infrastructure before performance takes a hit and users complain.
Click here for more information about how the H3C Intelligent Management Center (IMC) network management platform can play a positive role in virtual learning.
How have you handled the relationship between VLEs and IT? Did your institution bring you into the discussion early on or did you have to play catch-up once the platform was deployed? What advice do you have for others that are deploying VLEs to meet security and infrastructure demands? Let us know below.
