Extending and enhancing IntraLearn

In my last job, I spent six years working with the IntraLearn Learning Management System. I used it literally from it's alpha and beta days right up until August of 2004. In that six year time span, I extended its capabilities to an impressive degree, allowing it to do things that even the developers insisted the product could not do.

In all modesty, I know more about IntraLearn than most the people who work on its code base.

So I've added a new category to my BLOG. Starting with this entry, I will offer a series of articles on how to extend IntraLearn and it's capabilities, how to allow it to scale beyond it's initial specifications and how to stabilize it.

At last count, the IntraLearn infrastructure I designed was able to handle close to 200,000 students with minimal difficulty, using a good deal of custom code.

You may wonder what could possibly motivate me to just give away all my expertise on IntraLearn. The answer is simple, I have no interest in working with it again, so keeping all my data to myself for future use as a contractor is not a consideration. In the end, IntraLearn has some substantial limitations that will forever keep it on the low end, ruling it out of real enterprise use. There are fundamental flaws in the software, and I want people to have the tools necessary to move beyond those flaws. I fully expect the most useful of my planned essays to be the ones detailing how to move student and course data out of IntraLearn and into a different system.

When I'm finished, if you wish to leave IntraLearn, this site will give you all the tools and information necessary to make it happen.

If you must use IntraLearn, this site will enable you to get the most out of the product, allowing you to use it in situations and student populations that not even the authors of the product thought could be done.