Republic Polytechnic in Singapore Upgrades Database to Support Problem-Based Learning

Situation

Republic Polytechnic of Singapore believes that technology changes lives and transforms learning outcomes. Since it opened in August 2002, its early adoption of new technologies and abiding commitment to a paperless environment for teaching and learning have yielded great results.

Samuel Liu, CIO, Republic Polytechnic, says: “A deeply rooted e-culture helps students to think out of the box. We are priming our students to be the workers of the future, which is why we put in place an environment for 100 per cent electronic information exchange among staff and students from day one.”

Unlike many other campuses, there are no textbooks or paper notebooks at Republic Polytechnic. Instead, every student is equipped with a wireless laptop. Students can access the Polytechnic’s connected learning environment whether on a bus, at home, or in the classroom, where students sit in groups at round tables, not in serried ranks of desks fixed to the floor.

It comes as no surprise to prospective students that from the outset all students needed to enroll for a programming course in Microsoft® Visual Basic® development system or Microsoft Visual C#® development tool regardless of their disciplines. Similarly, staff have been pushed to forget ‘pen and ink’ and rely on Tablet PCs as a mobile device, meeting scheduler, and working tool. There are no photocopiers or fax machines on campus.

Republic Polytechnic soon became almost a victim of its own success. The polytechnic had standardised on Microsoft Windows Server System™integrated server software and deployed Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 as its preferred solution for storing and analysing student data, and teaching and learning outcomes. But, with rapid growth in student numbers from a standing start in 2002 to 3,700 by the spring of 2005, SQL Server 2000 was stretched to the limit, especially at certain times in the academic day.

Liu says: “Database servers were sometimes stressed when, for example, students logged on first thing in the morning for the online understanding test. We had been very happy with the dependability, productivity, and value for money provided by SQL Server 2000, but we were keen to keep operating costs low.”

The Polytechnic needed to accommodate 13,000 students by 2009, and move to a new campus in 2006, and rapidly roll out the new database solution in three months. The Polytechnic also wanted to achieve the following:

Load balancing capability with support of application software.

The flexibility to redirect users to another database in case of failure.

Strong indexing and integrity of databases.

Data replication for distributed data processing applications.

Online analytical processing (OLAP) for analysis of multi-dimensional data sets.

Comprehensive creation, management, and delivery of interactive reports.

The ability for students to use the latest Microsoft development system in their everyday studies.

Solution

Republic Polytechnic is proud of its track record in architecturing applications in house and developing them with outsourced partners, including student information and course schedules. It was natural to turn to Microsoft Services in Singapore for advice in seeking to become an early adopter of both Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system. The Polytechnic also decided to work with Microsoft partners Intel and HP in implementing the project.

The partnership between Microsoft and Republic Polytechnic means that Microsoft provides students and the faculty with the latest technology and even early technology. In early 2005, Microsoft invested U.S.$46,000 in software for the Polytechnic’s business solutions laboratory to encourage the development of enterprise applications.

The Polytechnic had enjoyed a positive experience with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and wanted to continue to use a Microsoft Windows®operating system environment. After a successful proof of concept (POC), the Polytechnic decided to implement SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. Liu says: “It will take us just three months to complete the migration and there will be no disruption to our students. This is much faster than any alternative software.”

SQL Server 2005 includes many new technologies that empower the developer and bring significant increases in developer productivity. It helps developers to create secure, robust database applications more easily and at a low cost. It natively supports storage and query of extensible mark up language (XML) documents, an important standard for transmitting data.

Security enhancements, such as database encryption, secure default settings, password policy enforcement, fine-grained permissions control, and an enhanced security model, provide greater security by default and more granular management.

SQL Server 2005 also meets the Polytechnic’s need for database mirroring by providing rapid automatic failover to a standby server. During restore operations, if they are necessary, only affected data is briefly unavailable, because the rest of the database remains online and available. “In the event of a primary server failure, database mirroring ensures that a fully-synchronised service is available within five to 10 seconds,” says Liu.

The Polytechnic is also using OLAP in organising data into an intuitive structure to support both prescribed and ad hoc queries that identify rules, relationships, and patterns. Both real-time and scheduled reports are accessible through a browser, familiar laptop applications, or specialised line-of-business tools. Key performance indicators (KPIs) help Polytechnic managers to articulate, communicate, and measure performance metrics for teaching and learning outcomes.

In computing, Intel Architecture-64 (IA64) is a 64-bit processor architecture developed in cooperation by Intel and Hewlett-Packard, and implemented by processors such as Itanium and Itanium 2. At Republic Polytechnic, SQL Server 2005 is running in an Intel architecture-based environment. It helps unlock the market-leading capabilities of 64-bit Intel Xeon processor-based servers. Channarong Boonratanasmai, Intel Microsoft Alliance Manager for South Asia, says: “Innovative Intel technologies, such as hyper threading technology and Intel multi-core processors, immediately boost the performance of SQL Server 2005 for better server utilisation. Also transitioning applications to hyper-threading and multi-core processors is simplified by using Intel software development products within the Visual Studio 2005 environment.”

HP played the role of technology enabler for Republic Polytechnic, providing test environments for the critical benchmarking and evaluation of the new system. Diane-Lh Liau, Alliance Manager, HP, says: ”As a result, Republic Polytechnic decided to adopt and deploy SQL Server 2005 on HP 32-bit ProLiant servers for the management of workload requirements. An important point in the evaluation was the remote manageability of the servers and ease of deployment during upgrades. Republic Polytechnic is now intending to deploy HP 64-bit Integrity server in the third quarter of 2006.”

Benefits

64-bit Capacity Helps Manage Rise in Student Numbers

SQL Server 2005 supports applications in educational user environments ranging from a small faculty to the largest university. At Republic Polytechnic, where 3,000 more students will arrive in April, applications need to support large numbers of users with spikes in activity at various times in the working day.

Liu says: “We will take advantage of the 64-bit capacity of SQL Server 2005 to split our database into multiple servers to push up server performance at peak periods and increase the uptime. Faster transaction times mean that students no longer experience any slowdown in performance.

“With 3,700 students on campus we are already experiencing 4.5 million hits a day and this could rise as high as 18-20 million a day when we reach full capacity.”

Low Total Cost of Ownership Delivers Rapid Return on Investment

SQL Server 2005 is delivering powerful, productive tools to IT professionals, academics, and students throughout the Polytechnic. By reducing IT complexity and empowering users across the campus, SQL Server 2005 is providing a flexible development environment for the Polytechnic’s small team of developers.

Liu says: “Some CIOs put their faith in those branded and more established enterprise database servers, but in my view, SQL Server 2005 is able to meet our need and will give us an excellent support infrastructure with a lower total cost of ownership, even when we grow to full strength of 13,000 students with 18-20 million hits per day. For us, value for money, early return on investment, and cost considerations are important for everything we do. SQL Server 2005 delivers on all three.”

Database Upgrade Solution Supports Problem-Based Learning

In educational terms, Republic Polytechnic is an enthusiastic proponent of problem-based learning (PBL) and the first to adopt it 100 per cent in Singapore. PBL means students learn in small collaborative groups with teachers acting as facilitators rather than instructors.

Accordingly, the Polytechnic encourages its students to take responsibility for their group and organise and direct the learning process with support from a facilitator and the appropriate technologies, including SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. From now on, every student will be encouraged to learn to use Visual Studio 2005, whatever discipline they follow.

Unlike some other institutions, Republic Polytechnic has succeeded in outlawing paper-based systems and all its understanding tests are conducted electronically. Liu says: “Our students carry a laptop, which is their window for everything they do. In the same way that other people carry a calculator, our students carry a laptop. We have no desktop PCs here and the Internet is one of the students’ and staff’s major resources.”

Liu adds: “We are in the fortunate position of being able to put IT into the centre of our business processes. SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 provide a wonderful, secure environment for connected learning and the PBL approach we have adopted. Many older institutions suffer from having had to wrap IT round existing processes.”

Security Features Help Invigilate Examinations

An essential feature of the student experience at Republic Polytechnic is the absence of paper-based examinations or tests. The enhanced security features of SQL Server 2005 are an invaluable aid to control access to tests and safeguard data confidentiality.

“By comparison to paper-based systems we are much more secure from cheating in the sense of accountability,” says Liu. “All access to the test papers are tracked by the system. Our IT solution gives us the ability to define security relationships at each architectural level and enforce rigorous password policies.”

Improved Monitoring of Teaching and Learning Outcomes

The upgrade to SQL Server 2005 puts new tools into the hands of university administrators in monitoring student learning outcomes and quality of teaching. It puts critical, timely information into the hands of all employees, but is especially valuable in creating ad hoc and scheduled reports.

Boonratanasmai says: “SQL Server 2005 running on Intel-based servers provides a comprehensive business intelligence environment that delivers integrated support for end-user reporting and data analysis. As Microsoft continues to drive the development of new software, Intel’s leading server environment is helping deliver new usage models for greater end-user productivity.”

Liu says: “With three years of student data accumulated, we now have a highly sophisticated data repository with SQL Server 2005. The ability to interrogate the database and produce meaningful real-time reports means we can tackle any problems students or teachers may be experiencing—quickly and effectively.”

Microsoft Windows Server System

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