“We’ve just completed our first full year with our courses running on the Desire2Learn and Microsoft mission-critical platform, and we’ve been thrilled with the uptime and performance.” Storie Walsh, Director of Instructional Technology, Virtual High School To enhance its online education programs, Virtual High School Global Consortium implemented a learning management system created and hosted by Desire2Learn that runs on the Microsoft platform. Based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, the solution has delivered improved uptime and scalability. As a result, the nonprofit organization can now focus on enhancing its educational programs and better serving a growing number of students. Business Needs Virtual High School Global Consortium (VHS) has been a leading provider of online education since 1997. Based in Maynard, Massachusetts, VHS collaborates with 770 member schools to offer 200 rigorous online courses that help develop the twenty-first-century literacies that students need to prepare for college and careers. The organization’s small, highly interactive global classrooms bring together 15,000 students and 350 teachers from 45 countries and 35 U.S. states. VHS teachers are certified in their subject area, have completed a graduate-level course in online teaching, and actively teach at member schools. VHS handles registration and runs all its courses through a hosted learning management system (LMS) that students and teachers connect to through the Internet. Students not only use the LMS solution to receive and submit assignments, but they also collaborate through blogs, wikis, discussion forums, and other web tools. Both students and teachers rely on VHS to provide high levels of availability for the mission-critical system. Storie Walsh, Director of Instructional Technology at Virtual High School, says, “We have students and faculty participating from around the world, so no time is a good time for an outage.” With all its courses online, the organization’s IT team routinely evaluates the performance of its own LMS system and also looks at new products. In 2008, VHS decided it was time for a change. The organization wanted better administration and collaboration tools, and it also needed to improve availability. Downtime with the current LMS solution had become a weekly occurrence, and VHS was also concerned about scalability. Its student enrollment was increasing annually by 15 to 20 percent—a rate that VHS expected would continue to accelerate. Walsh says, “It had become clear that, in addition to other technical problems, our server could not handle the increasing workload.” Solution VHS began evaluating leading LMS providers and ultimately chose Desire2Learn for its LMS solution. Desire2Learn, a Microsoft partner with Silver Hosting and Silver ISV competencies, offered a system with an enhanced user interface and toolset and improved scalability. Running on the Microsoft mission-critical platform, the Desire2Learn LMS solution was the right choice for VHS. The organization trusted Customer: Virtual High School Global Consortium Website: www.goVHS.org Customer Size: 30 employees Country or Region: United States Industry: Education—Secondary education institutions Partner: Desire2Learn Partner Website: www.desire2learn.com Customer Profile Virtual High School Global Consortium is a nonprofit pioneer in online education for K-12 students and in course design and instruction for teachers. It has students in 35 U.S. states and 45 countries. Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio − Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise − Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Technologies − Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Desire2Learn Learning Environment For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies Microsoft Server Product Portfolio Customer Solution Case Study Online Learning Management Solution Improves System Reliability and Scalability