Modernizing a University Learning Management System

The client is a public research university with about 18,000 students and faculty members, running a learning management system that had grown organically over a decade and was never load-tested for concurrent exam-week traffic. However, they faced significant hurdles:

• Crash Prone: The system went down during every finals week, right when students and faculty needed it most.
• Security: Student data was vulnerable on unpatched, aging servers with no formal patch-management process.
• UX: The interface was dated and mobile-unfriendly, hurting adoption among a majority-mobile student body.
• IT Overload: The small in-house IT team spent finals week firefighting instead of supporting faculty and students directly.

We migrated the LMS to Azure with a focus on surviving predictable peak-load events like finals week without manual intervention:

• Azure App Service: For auto-scaling web tiers that expand automatically ahead of known high-traffic exam windows.
• Azure SQL Database: A managed database tier sized to handle high concurrency during exams without the manual tuning the old system required.
• CDN Integration: To serve recorded video lectures quickly to students globally, including those accessing courses from outside the university's home region.
• Modernized UI: A responsive redesign built mobile-first, reflecting how the majority of students actually accessed the platform.

The new system supported roughly 18,000 active students during finals week without a major issue, ending a years-long pattern of exam-period outages. The updated UI/UX also led to higher student engagement scores in the following term's survey.

The university's IT team reported finals week became, for the first time, a non-event operationally — freeing them to focus on faculty support rather than infrastructure firefighting.