Project overview
The institution’s legacy LMS was end-of-life, poorly accessible and unable to handle enrolment peaks. Faculty used a dozen unsupported plugins to fill functional gaps.
CodeQube delivered a modern LMS with course authoring, assessment, discussion, analytics and deep integration with the student information system.
Business problem
Where the client started.
Enrolment-week outages as the monolithic LMS buckled under 10× normal traffic.
Failing accessibility audits, putting the institution at legal risk and disadvantaging learners.
Grades and enrolments synced to the SIS by nightly CSV, causing frequent discrepancies.
No learning analytics; at-risk students were identified only after failing.
Proposed solution
What we proposed, and why.
A modular platform built on Django with a React front-end, structured around bounded contexts for courses, assessment, communication and analytics.
Event-based, near-real-time SIS synchronisation for enrolments and grades.
An accessibility-first component library validated against WCAG 2.1 AA with assistive-technology users.
A learning analytics layer surfacing engagement signals and early-warning indicators to advisors.
Architecture
How the system is put together.
A React SPA with server-rendered public pages talks to a Django REST API split into domain modules. Celery workers handle grading, notifications and SIS sync via a message bus; an analytics pipeline streams engagement events to a warehouse.
Technology stack
Backend, frontend, data and cloud.
Challenges faced
What got in the way, and how we dealt with it.
Challenge
Traffic increased 10× for 72 hours twice a year.
Resolution
Read-heavy paths cached at the edge and in Redis; horizontal autoscaling with pre-warmed capacity scheduled ahead of known peaks; load tested to 15× baseline.
Implementation details
How delivery was sequenced.
- 1
Discovery & design (months 1–3)
Faculty and student research, accessibility baseline, information architecture and platform architecture sign-off.
- 2
Core platform (months 4–8)
Courses, content, assessment, discussions and SIS sync delivered in sprints with a pilot faculty of 30 instructors.
- 3
Migration & analytics (months 8–11)
Content migration tooling, learning analytics pipeline and advisor dashboards.
- 4
Institution-wide launch (month 12)
Cutover during the summer term with training, support desk integration and hypercare.
Non-functional requirements
Security and scalability considerations.
Security
- SSO via SAML with the institution’s identity provider; granular roles for students, faculty, advisors and administrators.
- FIPPA-compliant handling of student records with encryption at rest and access logging.
- Regular third-party penetration tests and dependency scanning in CI.
Scalability
- Stateless application tier on EKS scales to enrolment peaks automatically.
- Media served from S3 via CloudFront; database read replicas absorb analytics queries.
- Async processing isolates grading and notification bursts from the interactive experience.
Results & business impact
What it delivered.
Business impact
- Advisors now intervene with at-risk students on average five weeks earlier.
- Grade discrepancies with the SIS eliminated through event-based sync.
- Platform adopted by two partner institutions under a shared-services agreement.
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