CADD Associates Case Study
Project: LightSpeed Courseware Learning Management System (LMS)
Technologies: ASP.NET, ADO.NET, SQL Server, C#, VB.NET, HTML, Javascript
This is an example of CADD Associates’ work on a mission critical e-Learning project for a long term client.
For over ten years Lightspeed Technologies, Inc. has produced and sold Engineering e-Learning to Daimler Chrysler, Ford, GM and second and third tier suppliers. When Lightspeed was a start up and over a period of about four years we would occasionally help them organize their course data for CD publication, always thinking about their future database requirements. We devised naming and numbering systems for courses and media and generally designed the foundational bricks of future development. We did this without incurring extravagant costs and while remaining flexible to their changing business needs.
When they were in need we wrote a content management program to help LightSpeed edit and update their courseware in an organized fashion facilitated by the prior work. Again, everything we did was done with attention to the software design's ability to meet their future needs.
Then, when it came time to move their content off CDs and on to the web, they asked me what to do.
They already had a great foundation to move to this new platform and we quoted about two months of work with a couple weeks of testing and shakedown. That's what it took and the site was done with content and license management, reporting, quizzing and scoring and even personalized student experiences including Notes and Highlighting. Student surveys often remark how easy the site is to use.
Lightspeed's Learning Management System (LMS) provides companies and learning institutions with a cost effective way to quickly deploy e-learning enterprise-wide. Just a few of the features the LMS are:
- Launch and track web-based training
- Design curriculum for specific needs
- Deliver training automatically to selected groups or individuals
- Customize the interface to your branding
- Provide hot topics and messaging to students
- Allows students to keep notes tagged to specific content areas
- Allows students to leave a course and start back where they left off
- Import AICC compliant courses as well as some proprietary formats
- Design and build courses from scratch by cutting and pasting from existing material
- Assess learning effectiveness through robust reporting and analysis tools
- Host on your platform or subscribe to our hosted solution
Visit the site at http://www.lightspeedcourseware.com
Having an application running on a remote trusted server can be a good solution, but it required special handling, and they had lots of issues with their web and data servers residing at a large hosting company. They were getting denial of service attacks, overwhelming database attacks and so on which we dealt with at least once or twice a week.
I suggested they invest in about $5,000 worth of hardware so we could set them up with an in-house server which would eliminate those problems as well as CADD Associates monthly support bills and of course they wouldn't have to pay the monthly remote hosting fee. Additionally, any new updates to their application would be much easier to address since the application was now behind their own firewall. They seemed to think it was too good to be true and felt sure that "bigger must be better" but they trusted our expertise and experience and made the commitment of switching to an in-house server.
That was several years ago and we last sent them a bill of $350 for six months of support (server security updates, training calls, etc). This example came to mind because they emailed us most recently saying they thought they'd found a bug. It turned out to be a user training issue and we addressed that immediately. No bug reports in over a year and only $700 a year in support because they trusted our advice and drastically reduced their monthly infrastructure and support costs. They’ve been able to re-invest their software maintenance budgets into income producing projects and updates.
Today there are advances in shared platforms called elastic computing clouds in which you only pay for the infrastructure you need at the time you need it. So on a high peak day you may have many servers supporting your users, on a quiet day you may only have a few. You only pay for the servers you require by load. This is our next recommendation to this client.
Our added value is bringing experience and expert advice to your concepts to form and deliver strong, flexible, well considered design implementations that are robust enough to require very little ongoing support. We much prefer delivering solid design and implementation over billing for monthly support.
If you decide to retain our services, we would enjoy the opportunity to work with you on your upcoming projects, and we look forward to hearing from you soon.
Jeff Roberts
CADD Associates
13065 Little Big Horn Ct.
Ste. Genevieve, MO
63670
(636) 537-8120
http://www.caddassociates.com