AcademiaUP: Empowering Distance Education at University of Porto

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing demand for online. University of Porto (U.Porto), established an unit of Educational Technologies 20 years ago and after an accumulated experience in providing an Learning Management Systems (LMS) to support face-to-face teaching and learning (T&L), in 2016, the U.Porto developed AcademiaUP, a portal and a LMS platform for the delivery of e-learning and blended learning courses. Based on LMS Moodle, AcademiaUP considers the specificities of deployment and creation of distance education contents and materials, as well as the target audience characteristics. Moodle was chosen because our acquired experience but also for its maturity, for being open source and fully customizable and for a large support community. AcademiaUP, has an extensively customized interface and technical infrastructure. It integrates with external tools, BigBlueButton to better respond to synchronous online communication and Panopto for lecture capture and video production. AcademiaUP uses new plugins and a new theme to improve usability and enable a more suitable navigation for formal and non-formal T&L environments - sequential content delivery and contextual presentation of activities and resources. When designing the new LMS for AcademiaUP we were inspired in Coursera Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) approach for the marketing of the courses and in Open2Study for the delivering of the courses. All changes, however, avoided altering Moodle's core code, allowing for easier upgrades whenever newer Moodle versions are available. For the future, we intend to integrate AcademiaUP with the University information system to improve consistency of courses and users essential to accreditation procedures and quality assurance.