Universidade Aberta, Portugal's leading institution for distance learning, embarked on a digital transformation journey to address the unique challenges of managing its diverse and globally dispersed student body. With students located across multiple time zones and countries, the university needed a system that could automate administrative tasks, reduce manual errors, and ensure seamless integration between platforms. To achieve this, Universidade Aberta adopted WISEflow two years ago, focusing on integrating its Learning Management System (LMS), Moodle, with the WISEflow API.
This integration aimed to streamline operations, improve scalability, and enhance the overall student and teacher experience. By leveraging API capabilities, Universidade Aberta developed a robust, scalable, and efficient framework that addressed its operational challenges and prepared it for future growth.
The Need for Integration
Distance learning requires robust systems to manage students and academic activities efficiently. With students scattered globally, the university sought to:
- Automate administrative processes, including minimizing manual interventions in managing student data, course flows, and grading.
- Streamline workflows between their Learning Management System (Moodle) and WISEflow.
The integration began two years ago with a pilot involving a limited number of users. Encouraged by its success, the university is now scaling the system to all students, with anticipated user growth of 60% in the coming year.
Challenges and Solutions
API Authentication
One of the primary challenges Universidade Aberta faced was the frequent need to authenticate API requests. The first version of the integration generated a new token with every call, which, when repeated hundreds of times daily, could lead to inefficiencies. To address this, the university developed a validation mechanism that checks the token's expiration time before generating a new one. This optimization not only reduced redundant requests but also ensured consistent system performance, particularly during peak activity periods.
Student Management
The integration automates essential student lifecycle operations, ensuring efficient handling of user data in line with the academic system:
When a student enrols, their profile is automatically created in WISEflow, ensuring seamless access to assessments. Similarly, when students graduate or temporarily suspend their studies, their profiles are deactivated to align with the licensing terms of WISEflow, which are based on active users. If a former student re-enrols, the system reactivates their profile without any manual intervention. This automation ensures accurate record-keeping and significantly reduces the administrative burden, allowing staff to focus on more strategic tasks.
Key takeaways:
- Automated User Creation
- Dynamic User Updates
- User Reactivation
Assessment Workflow Automation
Assessments are efficiently managed through the integration. The system automates the creation of flows, which include details like start and end dates, evaluation periods, and the roles of assessors and reviewers. Each teacher is granted the flexibility to select the flow type that best aligns with their course objectives, allowing for a customized evaluation process. By automating these steps, the system reduces the risk of human error while ensuring consistent and efficient handling of assessments. This streamlined process allows educators to focus on teaching rather than administrative tasks. The university also streamlined the assignment of participants to specific course flows. This automation ensured that students were correctly linked to their courses without requiring manual verification.
As stated by a member of the project team: “We need to create and manage the flows in a very keen manner with the least human effort and obviously reducing the errors that could arise from a specific set of persons doing it by hand.”
Key takeaways:
- Flow Creation: Assessments are automatically generated in WISEflow, including key details such as start and end dates, evaluation periods, and roles of assessors and reviewers.
- Error Reduction: By automating the setup, the integration minimizes the risk of human errors that could arise from manual input.
- Customization: Teachers have the freedom to select the flow types that best suit their courses, ensuring a tailored evaluation process for each academic activity.
This feature ensures that assessments are managed consistently and with minimal administrative overhead.
Grade Management
Similarly, the integration simplified the grading process. Teachers could finalise grades in WISEflow, and the system automatically synchronised the results with Moodle. To maintain teacher autonomy, the university developed a custom Moodle block that allowed each faculty to trigger the completion of evaluation periods as needed. This provided flexibility for teachers while adhering to centralized administrative protocols.
Key takeaways:
- Automatic Transfer: Once grades are finalised in WISEflow, they are automatically synced back to Moodle, creating a single source of truth for academic records.
- Teacher Flexibility: Teachers can adjust grades as needed during the evaluation period, ensuring accuracy before final submission.
- Institutional Control: The system ensures that grades are only published once evaluations are complete, maintaining a structured and reliable grading process.
This synchronization eliminates the need for manual data entry, reduces administrative workload, and enhances data reliability.
Teacher Autonomy
Recognizing the importance of teacher independence, the integration provides tools to empower educators:
- Moodle Block: A custom block allows teachers to view and manage their own flows without interfering with their colleagues’ assessments.
- Evaluation Control: Teachers can finalise evaluations before the default 30-day period if their grading is complete, making the workflow adaptable to individual workloads.
- Centralized Oversight: While teachers have autonomy over grading, the central administration retains control over evaluation timelines to ensure consistency.
This feature strikes a balance between teacher flexibility and institutional structure, fostering efficiency without compromising compliance.
The custom Moodle block allowing teachers to view and manage flows
Results and Impact
The implementation of the API integration delivered significant results across Universidade Aberta’s operations. By automating previously manual tasks, the university enhanced efficiency, freeing up administrative staff to focus on more strategic initiatives. The optimization of token authentication alone significantly improved system performance, while the automation of student lifecycle management ensured accurate and up-to-date records in WISEflow.
On the API documentation, the lead project manager said: “The API is very straightforward. In fact, the documentation provided by UNIwise to support the API usage is very simple to read.”
Faculty members benefited from greater autonomy and ease of use. The custom Moodle block allowed them to control evaluation timelines without the need for centralized intervention, fostering a more efficient workflow. This innovation was particularly valuable given the university’s large and geographically dispersed teaching staff.
Scalability was another key achievement. Initially piloted with a smaller group of students, the API framework expanded to support the entire student body. With a projected 60% increase in enrolment, the system proved capable of handling future growth without compromising performance. Additionally, the development of a Python-based suite provided administrators with tools to monitor, debug, and optimize API interactions, further enhancing the system’s reliability.
Lessons Learned
The success of Universidade Aberta’s API integration underscored the importance of leveraging strong documentation and tools. The comprehensive support provided by UNIwise, combined with tools like Postman, allowed the development team to test and implement API endpoints efficiently. Furthermore, the hybrid approach of automating routine processes while incorporating event-driven endpoints provided the flexibility needed to balance efficiency with user control.
The project also highlighted the value of scalability in technology planning. By designing the system to accommodate future growth, the university ensured that its operations would remain robust and efficient as its student body expanded.
Conclusion
The Moodle and WISEflow integration is a testament to how thoughtful implementation of technology can transform educational workflows. By addressing challenges head-on and focusing on automation and user-centric design, the university has set a precedent for institutions aiming to optimize distance learning.
As more universities embrace digital transformation, solutions like this highlight the importance of strategic integrations that balance technical innovation with user needs. For this Portuguese university, the journey continues as they refine and expand their system, ensuring their students and faculty remain at the forefront of modern education.