Addressing Concerns in Educational Social Network: A Technical Report

This report tackles the growing pains of an educational social network platform, addressing concerns related to user experience, platform reliability, and business scalability. It proposes solutions to enhance the platform's performance and user satisfaction. The report covers a range of issues, from server outages and slow website loading times to data security, backup strategies, and content submission methods. Key recommendations include migrating to cloud services (AWS) for improved scalability and cost-efficiency, implementing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare to accelerate website loading, and developing native mobile applications for Android and iOS to facilitate content submission. Furthermore, the report emphasizes the importance of robust security measures, including HTTPS encryption, automated backups, and proactive security reviews. The report also suggests discontinuing the email submission method due to its low usage and lack of structure. The overall objective is to provide a faster, more reliable, and user-friendly platform that meets the needs of educators worldwide, fostering growth and increased user engagement.

Running head: HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
Handling Business and User Satisfaction Concerns Using Technology in an Educational
Social Network
Your Name (First M. Last)
School or Institution Name (University at Place or Town, State)
1

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
Handling Business and User Satisfaction Concerns Using Technology in an Educational Social
Network
We are company providing a social networking site for educators in any institution of any
size and based anywhere in the world to share their expertise and gain new knowledge. Our aim
is to provide a reliable and fast platform on Internet, where educators can increase their skills and
in turn teach better, in addition to better career prospects for them. We will make it
inconsequential, whether you are in a high school, community college or a university or any
other place where you teach, anywhere in the world. Each of our contributor has the same tools,
audience and facilities at his disposal as everyone else. And all this will be more convenient than
posting an update on Twitter.
Currently, we have around 10,000 contributors growing around 3% per month for the last
year. As for the company, we are 75 employees strong with headquarters in Seattle, Washington
and partnerships with universities, corporate training centers, and other teaching academic
institutions around the world.
Now, we are facing some growing pains on the path of providing a reliable, fast and easy-
to-use platform and I will be tackling each of these concerns as reported by various users and
stakeholders with details of the technologies, methods and service providers to be used. The
problems we face are as follows:
1. User convenience for contributing and the reliability of the platform.
2. User contribution in languages other than English (with initial focus on
Portuguese and Mandarin)
3. Efficient and convenient access to the contributed data for company editors.
4. Correct and alleviate concerns for bias in data among a section of our users.
2

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
5. Technical planning, implementation and follow up with the solutions for the
problems.
Submission Engine Plan
Our one set of problems are concerned with submitting content, and in this section, I
handle the submission engine issues, and will also justify the choices for the solutions proposed.
Outages and underutilized hardware and bandwidth. Our users have reported outage of
services many times. This boils down to our servers being overwhelmed by unpredictable spikes
in requests to access the platform. Now, genuine incoming traffic is always good. It is good for
business, it means one of our contributions has probably gone viral and educators all over the
world are taking a keen interest in it. Also, in alignment with our goals to expand internationally
and increase customer base we anticipate a general increase in bandwidth and processing
requirements. However, these requirements pose a challenge and a cost and reliability tradeoff.
Buying and maintaining servers, renting leased lines, ensuring their security costs money. And
the servers processing power, the leased lines' bandwidth are in themselves useless if they are not
being fully utilized.
To solve this issue, I propose shifting the entire code and database to cloud services.
Cloud services provide resources (like processing power, database storage and management,
bandwidth etc) as a service taken from third-party providers and this contrasts with on-premises
hardware and Internet where we own the machines, and we manage the running costs like
electricity, IT staff, bandwidth rental. It is recommended that businesses expect spikes in their
traffic or when they want a more economical hosting solution, cloud services are recommended
(Kerr, Vu, & Davari, 2013). The cloud services automatically scale up the resources at our
3

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
disposal (they are billed in our account for the duration of use) during spiked traffic and later fall
back to the base plan we have subscribed to. This ensures availability at all times.
For cloud services, I recommend Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS provides tiered
plans and by analyzing our past usage data on our on-premises servers, we will subscribe to an
equivalent plan on AWS. Also a sufficiently powered CPU (Central Processing Unit) will be
chosen, so that processing does not introduce unreasonable delays. AWS allows auto scaling can
increase the resources billed to us during spikes in traffic and decrease the capacity during low-
demand periods ("AWS | Auto Scaling", 2016). I propose a six-month phase-in of cloud with our
on-premises server serving as a backup as we move the code and data to the cloud. We may need
to hire AWS specialists if our current team is not skilled in this regard. Also, after the test phase,
I recommend discontinuing the leased line and take the servers offline and store them for the
time being. The staff may be downsized to keep a few core people for on-premises servers once
the shift is complete to cloud.
User experience with slow website. Our clients have faced slow loading websites at
times. This is a bad news for any website on the Internet, our platform included. User
expectations are continually increasing and website speed is a factor in user experience and thus
the satisfaction of his goals. According to Gehrke & Turban (1999), website load time is the
most important part of a successful user experience. In the same vein, Google search engine
began to penalize in 2010 and show lower in search results those websites which are slow
(Singhal & Cutts, 2010). We see damages on two fronts with this issue. One, the new potential
customers, who are already interested in a product like ours and are searching for it will probably
not see our site in the top results. Thus we lose on this supply of free leads. Second, the existing
4

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
customers are put off by the lag and delays and this means less user satisfaction and probably
less contribution, which is the core of our activities.
To solve this issue, first let us spend a moment to understand the cause of it. No website
wants to be slow, but it happens. It happens due to any or all of the following reasons - server
responding slow, lesser bandwidth of server's Internet connection, geographical distance between
the server and the user of the website, lesser bandwidth of the user's Internet connection. Now,
the servers we subscribe to in the cloud services will be of a sufficient processing power, so as
not to introduce unreasonable delays, and same goes for the bandwidth of our servers. Also, they
will have large bandwidth at their disposal. For countering the lag introduced by data having to
move physically from server to the user (compare server and user both in USA with server in
USA and user in UK), we will use Content Distribution Networks (CDN) which will ensure
latest copies of our platform on servers around the world. For this and additional security
features, I recommend CloudFlare. As per the user's Internet connection bandwidth, we will
direct our Web Development team to make the page size, external dependencies etc as less as
possible to make the payload small. This will benefit the user with a slower connection and also
allow us to serve more people for a given expenditure.
Security of user's data at rest and in motion. Our user's data is the most valuable asset
we have, not only because of its inherent importance but also because of the trust it represents.
We have been adequately covered in our current infrastructure also. For the proposed plans, we
will be using Amazon Web Services (AWS) which employ various security mechanisms like
digital certificates, HMAC, SSL/TLS, WS-Security and WS-addressing (Schreiber, 2011) for
both the codebase and the databases. For data in motion as moves to and from the user's device
to our (cloud) servers, we will use using HTTPS (encrypted connection). User accounts will be
5

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
automatically logged out from their devices after some time of inactivity. We consider these to
be of adequate security, and will be consistently reviewing the security and upgrading as
required.
Backups. We will use automated and manual backups. Scheduled backups will be
working regularly to backup the data. Before any code change on server, a manual backup will
be taken. These backups will be maintained at multiple locations to improve resilience e.g. on
cloud server, on office computer, archived in an external hard drive etc. In the unfortunate event
of requiring a restore to the data, we will have backups ready to restored in under five minutes.
Our chosen cloud service, Amazon Web Service (AWS) allows for scheduling backups,
manual backups and restoring backups. Also, regular backups will be downloaded and archived
in Seattle office. The deployment team will be taking backups of data before pushing any change
on the production server.
Submission from multiple sources. Our users have indicated desire to be able to submit
from multiple sources. We must always keep in mind that our business runs because of our
customer, and his interests are our priority. With that in mind, we consider the rising use of
smartphones and tablets (Android, iOS) and how it is providing a new way to consume and
create data. This worldwide phenomena is giving rise to certain universal conventions in the
online- connected populations like the three-dot triangle open to the right as the 'share' icon, or
the propensity of people to share links of the content they agree with. Also, posting content on
the move using mobile devices is on the rise and is testified by the success of mobile applications
of services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, .
To account for this rising market and fulfilling the needs of our customers, I propose apps
built natively for different operating systems, overhauling the web interface and the
6

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
decommissioning the email method of submission. We note that apps for mobile operating
systems can be built in many ways: wrapping the website's mobile-optimized view in an app,
having a hybrid of native and website components or a pure app using the native facilities of the
operating system. An app, howsoever it is developed, serves to satisfy user requirements on a
convenient device, possibly on the move and also reinforces the brand for the user.
I recommend native apps for Android and iOS operating systems. For Android, a single
app will work on both phones and tablets, whereas for iOS, we will need separate apps for
phones and tablets (iPad). We will not focus on any other platform as we see less returns on
investment there. These apps will provide the functionality for submission of content after
authorization of user, and other facilities. They will be talking to the same database as the
website using secure APIs (Application Programming Interface) and will allow the user to
quickly fill in the required data in specified format. Another feature these apps will introduce in
the devices after being installed is that they will add themselves to the user device's 'Share' list.
Now, a user will be able to follow the same buttons to share any existing content from a large list
of supported services (Twitter, Blogger,WordPress, Facebook, web browsers) to the platform.
However, since we require a structure to the submission, this 'share' functionality will
prepopulate the submission form to which user will have to do a little more effort to add the
content to the platform.
Now, after covering mobile devices, we talk about website. The website will be
overhauled in conformance to the new format (discussed later) and developed with an eye
towards page load speed and lesser page size. I recommend removing email facility for
submission of content. The reason for this recommendation is driven by the statistics of usage of
this facility. Very less percentage of content is being created using email facility, so we can on
7

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
the face of it, remove this facility without loss. However, why email submission was problematic
is that it is inherently a free form text input and we will have difficulty imposing a format (and
the users will have difficulty following it in email) for different sections of submitted content.
This lack of structure to the document becomes a problem down the line and we need to find an
automated solution to this issue for our growth to be scalable.
Organizing information and its benefits . Standardization becomes an essential if a
system wants to grow beyond a limit e.g. screws have a standard size chart, that is why a screw
made in one country can perfectly fit in a product being made in another country. Our scenario is
similar in that currently the submissions have no definite form or a flow of thoughts. What this
basically means that only a small percentage of the contributions received are formatted and
logically arranged while most are haphazard in their flow. We clear that we are not talking about
the content quality, which is prerogative of the domain expert who is contributing, but rather the
arrangement of different sections and flow of thoughts. This creates issues down the line for our
company editors, makes the data less discoverable and reduces further processing by machines.
Likewise, the internal representations of the submissions is crude, with a single text data holding
the complete submission.
I propose a format which will be presented to user on any device he chooses to contribute
us on - website, Android app, iPhone, iPad. To this end, email submission (very low percentage
of submissions) facility will be retired. We will separate an ideal submission into its separate
components like title, introduction, body, conclusion, call to action, tags, language etc. The
interface provided will be providing separate input fields for these components. And we will
update the database representation to handle the individual components in place of a single giant
text field. They will have their database-level validations also, though validations will be
8

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
definitively taken care of at the server level. Also, local (user device's based) and server-side (we
confirm ourselves) validation will ensure that the minimum requirements for word-count etc are
met before we accept the submission. Basically, we will be giving a structure to our data.
What happens with this structuring of the data at the source is that the later processes
become efficient and that means quicker turnaround for everyone. Since, the data is structured ,
validated and stored in database in a more fine-grained way, we can rely on it and create tools
and interfaces for the company editors and the users. As for company editors, we will create new
tools which will map the user submission to specific parts of the software screen. The work of
the editor will be reduced as the content is already divided into components, and further
processing can proceed directly from there. A better search can be implemented now e.g. tags
can be searched only in the tags of all the content rather than a blind text search. We will further
build upon this structure to provide an enhanced interface to the users for accessing the content.
This would be a key area of focus and we will be outsourcing the user experience testing as we
have 15% of our social networking community dissatisfied with our current interface for
accessing data.
Multilingual submission. We are an international platform and appreciate the value for
user and our business of allowing users to contribute in their native language if that is what
desire. Our platform provides for submission in languages other than English, including
Portuguese and Mandarin. Let us walk through the process of a submission in a non-English
language and talk about the technologies involved in the process.
The charset of our website and apps will be UTF-8 as this is compatible with existing
ASCII systems and fully supports multilingual environments. There will be a dropdown which
will be preselected with the contributor's preferred language or English if he does not have any
9

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
preferred language set. As per recommended practice by Vertommen (2015), we will show an
alphabetical list of the languages the user submit his contribution in. The user may change the
language before beginning a new submission. This will update the direction and layout of the
website and the mobile apps e.g. right-to-left or left-to-right as per the language. Now, after a
decision is made of the language to contribute in, the user will choose his method of input -
direct entry in the chosen language (say Portuguese or Mandarin) or using transliteration where
the text written in English alphabet will be converted into target language as per the sounds of
the words. Depending upon the user's choice and the display size of the device (e.g. a smaller
display in a mobile device or a standard computer screen) we may show a virtual keyboard with
the chosen language's native alphabet or continue with the physical keyboard or the native
keyboard of the mobile device.
When the data is submitted to the server, the server-side code will check for the language
set and validate the input as per that. If there are any error they will be shown to the user with the
form as filled by the user at the time of submission. The database we are using is MySQL and its
character set is also UTF-8 and thus is capable of handling multilingual records. The submission
will be saved with an additional field identifying the language code, with the language code
mapping to another table of languages which we support. This language code will also be used
for selecting this submission to our company editors who are proficient in this language. Finally,
whenever this content will need to be shown, we will extract the language code and display the
content by updating the view accordingly.
10

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
Network map. Based on the discussion so far, I now present the network map for the
proposed infrastructure, as follows:
A
mazon
Web
CloudFlare CDN nearest to User 1
CloudFlare CDN
nearest to User 3
CloudFlare CDN
nearest to User n
CloudFlare CDN
nearest to User 2
User 1
User 3
User n
User 2
Headquarters at Seattle
Uploading code, database &
static assets (images, CSS etc) changes
using SSHCode files, databases & static
assets (images, CSS etc) of submission
engine at US West (Oregon) datacenter,
which is automatically distributed
transparently to other datacenters
Copy of static files like images, CSS
Copy of static files like images, CSS
Copy of static files like images, CSS
Copy of static files like images, CSS
User request for website gets
mapped to CloudFlare using DNS, & then
CloudFlare sends data back from the
datacenter nearest to the user, thus
minimizing latency and user-perceived lag
AWS hosts the Submission
Engine, and is secured by firewalls,
encrypted data in transit (TLS) across all
services, DDoS (Distributed Denial of
Service) attack mitigation, encryption of
data at rest, detailed monitoring and logging
CloudFlare Content Delivery
Network (CDN) provides first line of
defense by verifying browser integrity,
visitor reputation, maintaining block list /
trust list, preventing DoS (Denial of
Service) attacks
11

HANDLING CONCERNS OF EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
Let us understand the network map. We will be using Amazon Web Services
(AWS) cloud service to host our code and database, with the physical servers located at US West
(Oregon). We have chosen Oregon as it is a datacenter near of Seattle and supports autoscaling
as we want the auto scale facility to handle spikes in traffic as discussed above in this paper
("AWS Regions and Endpoints - Amazon Web Services", 2016). We will be subscribing to AWS
and will be provided with an interface to manage the configuration. Also, we will be pushing the
files and updates using SSH (Secure Shell) and automated tools. Being a cloud service, we
cannot know where exactly the files and databases are being stored. But we can access them
from the IP (Internet Protocol) and domain name mapped. The AWS is similar to our on-
premises set up as far as the user view is concerned. We will be developing and maintaining the
software at our headquarters in Seattle, Washington and be pushing the changes to the AWS
cloud.
From the AWS, our data goes into the Content Distribution Network (CDN) provided by
CloudFlare. CloudFlare handles the lag issue by becoming an intermediary between the user and
our (cloud) server. It keeps an updated copy of the website in its servers spread throughout the
world and fulfills the request of the user from the server most geographically near to the user's
area (as identified by IP address).
Core security is provided by AWS by way of firewalls, encrypted data in transit (TLS)
across all services, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack mitigation, encryption of data at
rest, detailed monitoring and logging. Additional security is provided by the CloudFlare CDN by
verifying browser integrity, visitor reputation, maintaining block list / trust list, preventing DoS
(Denial of Service) attacks ("Website Security Service - CloudFlare", 2016).
12