Giving Students an Easy Access to Line Courses and E-learning Platforms

Fabrice Moutte, Chief Information Officer at Sorbonne Université

As a result of Sorbonne Université's commitments and the hybridization of courses following the pandemic and lockdowns, demand for access to teaching resources and e-learnings has only grown. The logical consequence of this is to make access easier for our students.

Drawing the Landscape of Digital Pedagogy

Sorbonne Université is a research-intensive university created by the merger of Pierre et Marie Curie University (Paris 6) and Paris Sorbonne (Paris 4). Since 2018, the university has been delivering courses, some of them online, to students in the humanities, science, and medicine. As expected, more and more of these students have applied for a double degree. At the same time, Sorbonne Université and its seven European partner universities have contributed to the development of courses and shared courses within the 4EU+ alliance.

These two commitments generate the same demand for simplified access to resources without requiring the same technological approach. One of the keys to resolution is knowing who's where...and by 'who,' we mean which digital identity.

Solving cross-disciplinary issues

At Sorbonne University, we are fortunate to have centralized authentication. However, to improve the user experience when accessing online courses, and following the merger of the two universities, we had to modify the practices of our digital pedagogy teams. For a long time, they had been in charge of our LMS platforms and had been using their own authentication systems. We aligned their practices to use a single common authentication system and a single identifier. While using a central authentication service within a Moodle e-learning platform is fairly straightforward, changing the habits of digital pedagogy teams is no mean feat. They have to abandon their historical authentication systems in favor of a shared, mutualized, but uncontrolled technology. In order to do so, our IT department has delivered a technical and functional umbrella - using a Moodle hub with common central authentication. Then, as a proof of concept, it has been connected with one of the seven Moodle platforms in one of our faculties, allowing then our students and teachers to navigate fluently throughout the different Moodle servers without having to reauthenticate every time. With this success, the others were enrolled.

The keys to success in implementing this new process were to listen to the business without focusing on their fears, to understand Moodle technology and its possibilities, to define an integration standard with a shared and unique identifier per digital identity, and to deal with data recovery.

Solving the Issue of Course Sharing and Access between Universities

While the issue of authentication and the sharing of identifying data was relatively straightforward within our university, within the 4EU+ alliance, the issue is on a whole new level; while we can share our courses and have student exchange programs, despite local legislation in each state, we share little or no identifying data about our students or our courses. Another constraint at the start of this long-term project was to keep the courses strictly on the e-learning platforms of each university. It was also important not to change the way professors used these platforms. In this sharing model, the key is to be able to give an identified user access to a course on a platform that doesn't know him.

"While using a central authentication service within a Moodle e-learning platform is fairly straightforward, changing the habits of digital pedagogy teams is no mean feat"

First, we had to deal with access to a shared authentication space. Three years ago, not all the universities in the alliance were using EduGAIN despite the apparent simplicity of registering students directly in local student information systems. This is neither simple for users, who have to know several accounts, passwords, and sometimes mailbox addresses, nor effective in terms of cybersecurity. So, the first step was to convince and help those universities not using EduGAIN of its advantages.

The next step, the second, was to set up a hub - also known as an umbrella - to interconnect the e-learning platforms of each of our universities. This platform hosts authentication via EduGAIN and sits behind a private discovery service open only to our universities. As users are not well known to the local SIS and e-learning platforms, we rely on Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI). This standard enables authentication and course information to be exchanged between learning platforms.

The third and final step was to establish a link with LTI on each of our e-learning platforms and on the common 4EU+ platform. In addition, each of the shared courses receives a code to enable access by any student who needs it.

Feedback and Improvement

As often happens, managing change is no easy task. Convincing, reassuring, and transforming human processes requires time, pedagogy and a great deal of empathy. But that's the most rewarding and amazing part of the job.

On a technical level, to improve the user experience of our students at Sorbonne Université, we're going to work on the coupling between the courses they've registered for and those we know about in our student information system and the digital learning stored in our e-learning platforms for these courses. All this data is accessible via our own directory service, using scopes within OpenID connect authentication.

Within the alliance, it will be productive to promote the use of LTI version 1.3, which embeds identifying data and thus helps to reconcile local information with shared ones.

At the end of the day, working towards real adoption of this complete LTI 1.3 standard by all publishers, as well as defining interface contracts for identities and courses in the digital education sector, remains a daunting task.

Student information system