Course registration has been one of the most essential parts of countless student’s higher education lives for many decades. This enables the students to pick courses they can take during the semester. The courses typically vary based on numerous factors, including difficulty level and teaching format. This empowers students to shape their academic journey, enabling them to build a path tailored to their career goals, subject of interest, and learning preferences.
Apart from the students, course registration is also a pivotal function for universities and colleges. An effective course registration process enables higher education institutions to efficiently optimize different resources, such as faculty members, classrooms, and learning materials.
But, despite its importance, various institutions still face several issues in their course registration processes, especially since it is mainly done online nowadays. Despite the rise of digital registration portals, many universities and colleges face slow response times, errors, and other technical glitches in their systems during the period. In addition, the influx of users in the system looking to register for courses can lead to server overload, making the process much slower for the students.
This is where load testing comes into play. This performance engineering solution helps higher education institutions test the capacity of their software to prepare for peak user traffic during registration. Many universities and colleges invest in load-testing solutions, such as WebLOAD, to determine software performance and identify possible bottlenecks. One institution that heavily benefitted from WebLOAD is Bridgewater State University, enabling them to deliver optimal registration for their students.
Optimizing Course Registration: The Bridgewater Way
Located in southeast Massachusetts and only an hour’s drive away from Providence, RI, Bridgewater State University is one of the largest state universities in the Bay State. With over 180 years of history, BSU is home to thousands of students yearly, offering over 3000 courses in 100 study areas. And as one of the premier higher education institutions in the state, BSU needs to keep their digital systems in optimal condition to provide the best experience for their students.
With over 10,000 students competing to register for their desired courses before the semester, there is no wonder why timely registration is a concern for BSU. This is especially true as one of their worst fears occurred last year when their systems crashed during course registration after a database upgrade. Their engineers could not properly simulate course registration with their expected load, resulting in the website crashing during the registration period.
The Solution
The lack of experience in performance testing and tuning has resulted in a disastrous situation for the institution during registration. The unexpected system meltdown became a wake-up call for BSU’s IT team to implement corrective actions that guarantee the same issue won’t happen again. This includes investing in a load testing solution to simulate real-time course registration load and scenarios. And with many options in the market, they picked WebLOAD to help with their new approach to performance testing.
There are several reasons why WebLOAD by Radview Software is the clear winner for BSU. Their 1000 VU licensing from WebLOAD allowed their performance engineers to resemble realistic test cases that helped them prepare for registering student classes separately. And with WebLOAD’s advanced parameterization and correlation capabilities, BSU was able to use real data from previous registrations so that the tool could emulate real registrations accurately. Having WebLOAD has empowered BSU to fix its systems, with Radview providing the institution with the skills, script, and tool that help them identify bottlenecks in their portals.
The Results
BSU’s shift to WebLOAD provided various advantages to their performance testing efforts. The arrival of WebLOAD in their repertoire allowed them to move on from their traditional ways of quarterly testing and immediately test after every database upgrade. Additionally, WebLOAD allowed the institution to have a load test benchmark of 1,000 virtual users for future performance upgrades.
Besides improving the technology, using WebLOAD also helped BSU develop a robust contingency plan in case any issues emerge during registration. This involves pre-assigned staff roles and pre-approved communications to help them efficiently handle future concerns.
And with Radview’s world-class customer support, BSU was able to deploy a robust load-testing solution. This is highly beneficial with the institution’s commitment to further upgrades in their Ellucian Banner 9 environment and the possibility of adopting Oracle Database Appliances at their facilities. This ensures that BSU has the perfect tools to ensure a flawless course registration process for their students.
Conclusion
The growing expectations of countless students for a reliable digital course registration process means performance engineering must be a priority for universities and colleges. This can help them prepare their systems from peak user traffic that can cause technical issues at the worst possible time. Without proper load testing, institutions might miss significant issues in their systems that can lead to unexpected problems during the registration period, similar to what happened with BSU.
But by shifting to WebLOAD, universities can optimize their technology and processes to ensure that course registration is spotless. WebLOAD is a handy tool that can provide several advantages in the long run, including the opportunity to simulate realistic registration, provide insightful analytics, and identify bottlenecks in the software.
If you want to learn how WebLOAD ensures easy and comprehensive load testing for universities and colleges, get a demo today by visiting www.radview.com/schedule-demo.
