Over the last couple of months, we have been working with educators in the Philippines setting up a remote LearnKey enterprise. In a nutshell, the objective of this project was to create a standalone solution for our OnlineExpert.com website. This means a server was loaded with our code base, media content, and database information so that students could connect directly to the server to access our courseware instead of connecting over the Internet.

This project was successful due to the work of many people. I wanted to share my experience of working with this enormous project.

This project was a great experience for our IT department. Due to the 14-hour time difference, we all experienced many late night-work sessions. We had the challenge of helping obtain servers by working through vendors in the Philippines and also assisting our contact at LGSMI. Once we had the servers ordered, I helped our developers get the code ready to load onto the servers. The primary challenge was to take a website and the associated database and make it run off a local intranet environment from the two servers we secured in the Philippines. This also meant we had to load all of the media for our courses onto these two servers. Another challenge we faced was unreliable connections over the Internet, which prevented us from transferring the data over the Internet.  We overcame this by loading everything that would be needed for the servers onto an external hard drive and sending it to Manila, Philippines. Our CEO, Jeff Coruccini, flew the external hard drive to Manila  and transferred all of the data to our new servers.

So far, I have outlined a lot of the challenges we faced with this project. I don’t want you to get the idea that this project was only difficult. We have learned a great deal about our own website and database and how they talk to each other. Our developers, who were not involved in the original site design, were particularly helpful with working through the code changes and server/network setup. They assisted us in configuring the server to properly load balance the traffic so we could ensure the absolute best experience for the students who would be using this system. They also got into the switch and modem configuration so that we could allow students to log in via a wireless network and access our courses.

The most valuable lesson through all of this has been that we can take on a challenge of this magnitude and still provide our customers with the best learning experience out there. The dedication and skills of our production and software development teams were put to the test, and they passed with flying colors. We are excited for what the future holds in the fast-paced field of eLearning, and I look forward to the ways that LearnKey will be championing the innovations of that field.