RM Education is a global education technology business ... ‘supporting teachers to teach and learners to learn’. In addition to classroom resources and school technologies, RM also provides collaborative learning platforms.

The RM Learning Platform is a web application specifically designed for schools with a comprehensive set of modules and web services. It is designed to fulfil many tasks of teaching and learning for students, teacher and parents.  Functionality includes:

• Providing personalised online spaces for students and staff.
• Integration with your school's management information systems.
• Create and share engaging resources, and set and mark assignments on line.
• Communication and collaboration tools

The RM Learning Platform is accessed by 2.5 million users in England, with GLOW – the Scottish version – being the first national education intranet for all students, teachers and parents in Scotland.  Additionally, there are major collaborative platforms in the USA and Australia.

 

We spoke with Brian Gibson, RM Technical  Architect, to find out why he had chosen Application Performance’s WebTuna product to help them monitor end user experience.

“Speed is very subjective and the impact of a page taking more than 3 – 4 seconds to load is a strong perception that it is SLOW, especially when compared to other major platforms our target audience is highly familiar with; ie. Google and Facebook where there is a perceived ‘instant’ response. If we are to get maximum buy-in we have to compete on performance terms.

“Originally we used KeyNote – a synthetic testing environment – to load and test a range of predefined pages. However, synthetic testing doesn’t show all the variables that impact web performance – such as the user’s own system and network\ internet environment – and it was clear that we needed real end-user monitoring.

“We selected WebTuna as we already had a strong working relationship with Application Performance – using Aptimize with SharePoint. Discussions began about a year ago and the application went live about 5 months ago in May 2011; it is now fully rolled out across the platform allowing us to see specific individual experience wherever they are located in the UK.

“In the majority of cases, performance issues being experienced were related to local bottle necks such as the local system infrastructure and, most usually, the  bandwidth consumption of their broadband connectivity. We are then able to target our support much more closely and advise specifically what the school needs to do at a local level to bring performance up to an acceptable standard which, in turn, has created better relationship building potential with our clients.

“Working with the guys at AP has been excellent – unlike the ‘big’ system providers, we have a personal relationship with the key individuals who are really savvy about what we are trying to do – and how we are doing it. They are really easy to work with and we can call them direct to discuss issues without working our way through layers of help lines and call centres.  They have worked with us to meet our scalability requirements and issues being instantly resolved and fine tuned.

“We continue to use synthetic testing, particularly to help us benchmark performance, as the two augment one another very well.”