Background
Dublin City University (DCU)(external link) is passionate about open source as part of its university ethos. They are advocates for open education resources and that influenced their decision to work with Catalyst. Before our partnership, Catalyst and Dublin City University had collaborated on various open source projects to:
- develop and enhance learning platforms such as Moodle and Mahara ePortfolio platform,
- share improvements back to the upstream projects to enable others to benefit in the true spirit of open source.
Challenge
DCU was looking for a new hosting partner with Moodle LMS expertise. They needed an authentic partner to fully support their online education initiatives and attain their business goals by delivering a close collaborative partnership to drive the online learning platform forward.
The university had experienced the frustrations and disruptions of hosting issues and lack of specific Moodle expertise with their previous hosting provider – being simply platform-as-a-service. Balancing the various unresolved issues with the scale and burden of managing Moodle within the university meant strong and robust support for the VLE became an increasing concern.
Catalyst and DCU forged a managed services partnership in the summer of 2019, moving the Moodle platform onto the university-owned cloud infrastructure using Catalyst’s fully containerised and scalable architecture design.
Since the onset of COVID-19, DCU has had growing staff and student numbers accessing the LMS (now numbering over 18,000). Expectations of high quality and successful online provision are rising significantly in line with this new and increased demand.
Solution
DCU started working with Catalyst in 2019. The initial project plan included 87 customised pieces of Moodle functionality for the growing network of over 18,000 students. Catalyst responded with a concise and proven project plan and a flexible, agile project management approach. A cloud architecture was implemented to move the Moodle application on time and within budget, with all stakeholders noting a positive project experience throughout.
Unique challenges – such as solutions for user, account and grade data integrations, were solved with close working partnerships forged between Catalyst Cloud and Moodle experts and similar experts at DCU.
Mark Glynn, Head of the Teaching Enhancement Unit, at Dublin City University, said "Catalyst are truly exceptional in their response and efficiency – a robust company to work with and a ‘can-do’ attitude – we can’t speak highly enough of them."
COVID-19 pandemic – a new challenge for online assessment
As COVID-19 rapidly took hold and lockdown began in Ireland, DCU requested a suitable e-assessment solution for 11,820 exams. Catalyst had five weeks to prepare the delivery of Moodle VLE for over 7,000 unique students' exams.
E-assessment solution
Catalyst had experience with such challenges and a ready-made e-assessment solution to achieve this. We rapidly presented a plan and delivery approach that met these needs and delivered confidence to the stakeholders at DCU. The preparation of the e-assessment system went smoothly and without any issues. Resulting in 1,200 concurrent examinations successfully occurring (using a model that could have increased to support 4,000 students taking an exam at any one time). Each exam had options for both assignment upload and multiple-choice question methods.
Academic integrity
DCU has devised a 12-point framework for Academic Integrity Principles, advising on robust assessment strategies and their design. They worked on question and examination design to ensure integrity, security and minimal plagiarism for e-assessments. DCU believes in a partnership and being proactive with students, staff and the institution at large. There are policies and supports in place with a positive technical infrastructure. DCU takes advantage of great resources such as those produced by JISC for assessment design. These fully support staff and allow them the freedom to be innovative with assessment and course design. An example of this is the option of a pre-recorded video uploaded to the VLE, rather than an ‘in-class’ presentation.
Accessibility
DCU is not only flying the flag for e-assessment but also removing barriers and unlocking the potential for more and more non-traditional students to have a university education. (23% of their intake constitutes non-traditional access students). Online learning has positively contributed to accessibility for these students and facilitates real flexibility.
