Online Courses and Video CDN
Online courses have become much more common with the rapid development of 21st Century internet technology. Regardless of the big or small, it has led to a change in the education approach of all students from all branches.
This new education system, which matches up with the increasing interest in mobile life, was positively received by the education institutions and their audience.
However, the increase in the volume of online classes has brought some problems.
Connection problems experienced in live lectures led to the widespread use of Video CDN in online education.
There has been an increase in online education in recent years
According to the research that has been made by Advancity, with the effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic, there was an increase in online education between 203% and 16000%.
In these years, when it is mandatory to live without contact but with social distance, online education has become the most effective way to protect ourselves from the virus.
After 2 years since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of online courses has increased even more. The reason is that the masses and institutions acquainted with online education take great advantage of the benefits of this system.
The lectures, which can be done more practical and faster than the traditional education approach, enabled the education to progress more efficiently.
Such positive events led to the development and spread of online education. The acceleration of the online education system has revealed the need for the development of the system infrastructure.
Courses that achieved high usage volumes had to evolve to provide everyone an access at the same quality.
The Internet Problem in Online Courses
The increasing participation in online courses and conferences has made it difficult for the desired service quality to always remain at a good level.
The high-volume connections established from all over Turkey and the world put the system much more strained than in previous years. As a result, changes and updates have occurred on the platforms where live courses and broadcasts are made.
These processes initially created some problems in the online education system.
Problems in the internet networks caused a decrease in the quality of live conferences and lectures. The efficiency of the students also decreased due to these problems.
The technical glitches experienced during the course damaged their interest in this education system.
There are main factors that cause these problems. We will share these factors with you in the upcoming chapters.
Connection Problems Lead to Educational Inequality
Students often encounter internet connection problems due to the location they live in. This problem caused not every student to get the same efficiency from the lectures.
Students who could not attend some classes were at a disadvantage compared to other students with whom they were educated. These disadvantages caused by online education have led to inequality in education.
When the infrastructure provided by the education institutions was not at a sufficient level from time to time, there was a disruption in the lectures. With such scenarios that should not be experienced in online education, students even lost interest in the lectures over time.
Actions to be taken to prevent this can be taken by both the online education providers and the trainees. In general, most of these connection problems are caused by online education sites.
What are the Causes of these Connection Problems in Online Education?
Connection problems caused both the lecturer and the student to be negatively affected. For this reason, improvements have been made in order to process online courses with better quality, considering the current volume of online education and the potential audience thereafter.
The main reasons for connection problems, which the developments focused on, can be shown as follows:
- Sudden traffic increase in live conferences or lectures,
- The infrastructure that will provide online courses is not planned according to the needs,
- Using online education systems that are unprotected against cyber-attacks,
- Not using Video CDN technology, also known as content delivery network.
These are the most known reasons, that can directly affect the quality of online education.
Lectures without the use of a Video CDN service remain open to many potential problems.
University Websites Should'nt Be Affected By Sudden Traffic Spikes
CDN is a network that is composed of geographically distributed servers that aim to deliver your content faster even when the client is physically far away from your origin server or your traffic is unbalanced.
Currently, many sectors are exploring the benefits of CDN and integrating it into their operations.
CDN service acts as a proxy between the client and your server, named Origin. Whenever a page from your website is requested, this request is directed to the CDN server.
If the content of the desired page is not cached in the CDN servers, it is requested from the origin and distributed over CDN servers around the world.
If it is already cached, then the CDN server directly sends the response to client without causing a load in the origin servers.
For more information about how CDN works, "Benefits of CDN" You can also check our article
The first striking cases are that websites are used by large user groups in universities and there are periodic crashes due to excessive traffic.
It is of great importance for universities to provide uninterrupted and high-speed service to their users because these users obtain critical information from these systems and perform their transactions through these systems.
The Relationship Between Video CDN Service and Online Education
First of all, “What is CDN?” Answering the question will help to understand the importance of CDN service.
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is the distribution network that ensures that your website content is kept on CDN servers located in different parts of the world and that the request to the site is answered from the closest CDN server instead of the main server.
With the CDN service, you can enable your visitors to open your site more quickly. At the same time, by increasing the circulation speed within the site, you can ensure that they get a better user experience.
Video CDN, on the other hand, works with the same logic, improving your live lectures and conferences or your videos on your site. It allows requests for your high-quality video content to be answered more quickly.
Thus, you will keep the connection problems experienced in online courses away from your website.
Benefits of Using Video CDN for Online Education
Accelerated Content Delivery and Scalability
The main channels through which universities convey current news and announcements to their students and employees are their websites.
It is common for these sites to become overloaded at certain times of the year and the servers become unable to respond to incoming requests. The examples of these periods are course selections and the dates of critical announcements.
By using CDN, you can quickly deliver your content to your users visiting your site. Our reviews show that using a CDN speeds up your website by an average of 83%.
With Merlin CDN's geographically distributed high-speed server network, you can provide uninterrupted service. Even during peak traffic periods, Merlin CDN delivers your content to your users with zero downtime.
Optimized SEO Performance
Websites also serve as an important promotional channel for universities. It is another critical issue that the sources from which prospective students can get the most detailed information about the university appear at the top of the search engine results.
For both university members and prospective students, seeing the website at the top of their search engine queries will have a positive effect.
With the CDN service, you can increase your SEO performance by responding to search engine bots much faster.
As Merlin CDN, we have located our servers close to Google's servers, thus providing unique SEO performance by responding to search engines much faster than other CDN providers.
Saving Money
With CDN, you can significantly reduce your costs. Replying to all requests coming to your website by your servers causes a great load.
If you are using a cloud service, this may increase your traffic and cause additional costs. If you keep it on physical servers, it may cause scaling and maintenance problems.
From the moment you start using Merlin CDN, your servers only respond to requests from Merlin CDN servers. All users entering your site access your content over the Merlin CDN network.
They do not create a significant load on your university's server. Thanks to Merlin CDN's simple and advanced management panel, you can easily maintain this service and save a significant amount of money.
WAF and DDoS Protection
Another drawback of users receiving responses directly from your servers is security problems. In order to provide uninterrupted service to your users and pr from cyber-attacks, you need to keep your servers secure.
Merlin CDN also offers the MerlinWAF service, which will be live soon, together with the CDN. With this service, you can eliminate harmful and unwanted traffic before it reaches your servers.
On the other hand, you can protect your resources against DDoS attacks as well. You can restrict your website to bots, malware, and certain user groups by using customizable and pre-defined rule sets within the WAF service.
24/7 Customer Support
It is uncertain when a problem may arise in a system that needs to be constantly available, but it requires quick action from the moment it arises.
Merlin CDN offers you 24/7 uninterrupted support with the support packages, and ensures that your site is always active by responding to your support requests in a short time.
With support packages, you can benefit from the experienced Merlin CDN team without hiring new employees for these jobs. In this way, you can save money and get quality service.
Video CDN Also Increases Your Cyber Security
One of the worst scenarios seen in online courses is the realization of cyber-attacks. Sabotage to events such as live lectures and conferences directly affects information security and live broadcast quality.
Inadequate security of the main server where the live broadcast is provided can pave the way for cyber-attacks.
You can use the Video CDN service to increase your cyber-security in live broadcasts. With Video CDN, your content is answered from CDN servers instead of your main server. This servers located between the end-user and your main server prevent direct connection to your main server.
In this way, the risk of your main server being affected in cyber-attack scenarios is reduced. In the event of a cyber-attack, your content will continue to be transmitted to your users from another CDN server, even if one of the CDN servers is affected.
Thus, your live broadcasts will continue to be watched uninterruptedly.
Enhance Your Video CDN Security with Token Authentication
The mentioned token can be briefly called encryption method if it is desired to be explained simply. It helps you to determine which requests to your content you want to allow.
Thanks to the specified token encryption, if the request comes, the IP address of the request is checked by processing the encryption algorithm. If the incoming request does not pass the token encryption algorithm, the request will not be responded with the desired content.
Requests that comply with the rules you set for token encryption will be answered, and those that do not comply will not be responded to and access to the site is not allowed.
To give simple examples of the rules, you can prevent unwanted requests by eliminating incoming requests with filters such as specified URLs and link expiration time.
For more information about Video CDN, contact us now.
Why Merlin CDN?
The list below shows the main benefit of the CDN service for universities. The list can be further diversified. Merlin offers these services in a convenient and easily integrated way. You can create your first distribution within 5 minutes from the Merlin Panel and directly observe the benefits of CDN to your websites.
Merlin CDN's support packages allow you to quickly resolve any problems you encounter. Our experienced support team quickly pay attention to your requests.
Universities are generally institutions surrounded by the high energy of young people. Merlin CDN can easily adapt to this system with its young spirit and high energy. It can offer job and internship opportunities to young people in universities.
In addition to these, universities usually have more than one website, and controlling them is a challenging task. With Merlin CDN's advanced Workspace feature, you can easily manage both your users and distributions from our interface.
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