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ILT Session Limit and performance

  • 24 August 2022
  • 5 replies
  • 99 views

For some background, we are a training provider for the automotive and aerospace industries. We have a few v/ILT courses that are part of mandated training for engineers to maintain an industry certification. As a result, they need to take training and recertify every few years.

These courses get scheduled often, like 250-350 times per year. We migrated to Docebo about a year ago, and recently finished importing historical session data. Due to internal and external requirements, we store the last 7 years of historical course, session, and enrollment data.

We now have about 1500 sessions under our largest course. Learners who are enrolled in a session of this course are experiencing 15-30 second load times when they click on the course tile on their homepage and attempt to load the session details. There’s no indication anything is happening, no loading bar or hourglass, the middle part of the screen is just blank until the sessions load in. It’s a pretty sub-optimal user experience.

After working with Docebo support, they indicate the delay is caused by number of sessions in the course. 

The suggested workaround is to split the course annually or quarterly. Not only would this complicate historical reporting, it’s not really an option for us due to the LMS’s integration with our other business systems (ERP, ecommerce website, etc.). 

As a novice, looking at the API calls, it appears the page is loading ALL sessions, then only showing those the learner is enrolled in. It seems like an obvious solution is to use a different API endpoint, one that only pulls session details for those the learner is actually enrolled in, right?

I’m curious, has anyone else run into this issue when there are a lot of sessions in a course? Were you able to find a suitable workaround other than multiple courses? I couldn’t find any mentions of limit on sessions in the knowledge base or help docs. I’m curious what the best practice is, should we stay under 500 sessions? 250? 

Am I in left field in thinking this should be fixed as a bug in functionality, rather than something that I submit to the ideas portal? If my car stopped working reliably after I hit 10,000 miles, I’d probably want to address the underlying issue rather than keep buying new cars.

 

5 replies

lrnlab
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Agree that the infrastructure may not be well suited for large numbers of sessions...we did something similar to what Docebo suggested to you but our reasoning was more about the fact that searching for sessions in specific locations was close to impossible so we created a course for each location and added sessions under those...it made the user experience much easier but on the admin side, there was a lot planning to get to that point. in order to manage the larger number of courses, we definitely leveraged the course APIs to create and update them. This would eliminate the lag time you are experiencing but not sure, as you say above, this would help you in the long term.

If you do want to create quarterly/monthly versions of your course to reduce the number of sessions, you could create matching catalogues labeled with the time span so it’s easier for your users to choose the right place to start...e.g.: January offerings, February offerings, etc. You can also leverage the catalogue description that displays to users to explain what the catalogues include, etc.

Another idea would be ask Docebo to include a date filter for courses with a large amount of sessions..that may help???

brandonbillings
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Agree that the infrastructure may not be well suited for large numbers of sessions...we did something similar to what Docebo suggested to you but our reasoning was more about the fact that searching for sessions in specific locations was close to impossible so we created a course for each location and added sessions under those...it made the user experience much easier but on the admin side, there was a lot planning to get to that point. in order to manage the larger number of courses, we definitely leveraged the course APIs to create and update them. This would eliminate the lag time you are experiencing but not sure, as you say above, this would help you in the long term.

If you do want to create quarterly/monthly versions of your course to reduce the number of sessions, you could create matching catalogues labeled with the time span so it’s easier for your users to choose the right place to start...e.g.: January offerings, February offerings, etc. You can also leverage the catalogue description that displays to users to explain what the catalogues include, etc.

Another idea would be ask Docebo to include a date filter for courses with a large amount of sessions..that may help???

 

In our model, customers browse and purchase/register on a separate website (training is just one thing we sell). LMS access is only granted after the sale is complete; that’s part of the integration challenge. If I have 4 versions of the course in the LMS, I’m going to end up with 4 different “products” in our finance system, and for sale on our commerce website. So with the flow we have, learner’s aren’t accessing the internal Docebo catalogs.

I know archived enrollments are coming soon, I wondered if an “Archived Sessions” functionality could possibly address this use case. It would really depend on how they build it. Our operations team has challenges filtering through the sessions on the admin side as well. If archived sessions were hidden by default, it would help.

lrnlab
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Some good ideas @brandonbillings ...seeing as ILT is still relatively new, it needs some improvements for sure...not sure if archiving is in the list so definitely worth logging that as an idea if you wish. The whole ILT app is a bit clunky and difficult to use as an admin or instructor so we need to push for enhancements like you mention above…

Question, have you looked into using a page that displays the sessions in a calendar format rather than all the same course? I wonder if that could help your lag issues…?

you can create a custom page with the just the catalogue widget but choose the “calendar” view.

brandonbillings
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Thanks! I’ll try the custom page as you mentioned and see if it’ll help.

It really came to a head the morning of a VILT session start. There were lots of students logging in to download PDF materials and get into the zoom sessions. They were panicking when nothing was loading.

lrnlab
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Oh man...I hear you...I know what that’s like and all fingers point to you of course...hopefully the calendar page helps a little.

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