1,000,000+ dreams begin this month…
The start of the new academic year has arrived in the UK, and our servers are getting busy! In the last three weeks of September we have seen the number of pageviews served by our infrastructure rise from 1 million page views to 1.8 million page views already. This compared to last year, when usage peaked in October with 1.6 million pageviews in one week.
Over the last five years, the Talis Aspire Reading Lists system has grown to host nearly 500,000 reading lists with over 20 million references. A system that started its life among three UK institutions, is now being used in over 85 institutions in eight different countries. And it is far from a one size fits all. Each institution has its own unique characteristics and challenges, so how they approach their implementation and rollout differs too. We saw an example of this in an article published in the recent edition of NAG journal, a collaboration between Stephanie Farley from the University of Edinburgh and Maria O’Hara from King’s College London.
Since August 2014, we have welcomed 15 more universities to the Talis community. Over the current European academic year our servers are preparing to serve up well over 40 million pageviews as students begin to access their reading lists and scanned chapters from our cloud-based servers. This brings some important and exciting technical challenges to maintain performance. Chris Clarke, our CTO, discusses how we approach this in his recent article on solving performance issues using evidence over instinct.
The number of pageviews we serve to the students is only half the story. During September, our infrastructure has been serving on average over 16 million app-server requests per week. This is a sharp increase from an average 11 million requests per week served last year for the same time period. We are seeing this because more institutions are using our LTI integrations and APIs to deliver a seamless experience to their students by delivering reading lists directly in their VLEs. This enables them to put the library at the heart of the student learning experience.
October is usually our busiest month. And we found that 2 PM on Tuesdays is generally the peak hour for students accessing their reading lists and digitised content!
We continue this journey, as more institutions place their trust in us to ensure technology is not a barrier in providing a great student experience. Our CEO discusses our deliberate focus on technology, and how we work with institutions to address challenges in delivering education during the keynote at Talis Insight 2015.
The Talis community are hosting nearly 500,000 reading lists with over 100,000 digitised chapters and 20 million references. They are welcoming in excess of a million students arriving at their campuses in the UK this month, many for the first time. And we are proud to support them.
How have you found your journey with Talis? We would love to hear your story, so please do share in the comments below…
