ATENEA: supporting over 35,000 University students with a Moodle-based learning platform

March 31, 2020 By Abby Fry

ATENEA, the virtual campus of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), is one of the largest Moodle installations in Spain. It serves more than 35,000 students, 3,500 professors and 10,000 classrooms each academic year and is growing at an annual rate of over 20%.

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC, is one of Spain’s top universities and is one of the leading technical universities in Europe.

This public institution of research and higher education offers degrees in the fields of engineering, architecture, sciences and technology to over 26,000 students, supported by over 3,000 teaching and research staff.

Challenge

As a result of the technological obsolescence of the UPC’s previous virtual campus, in 2004 the Governing Council of the University set up a committee to overhaul the system. It was time to take a step forward to adapt the virtual campus to new teaching and management requirements and make it more usable, with greater capacity for integration with the UPC’s other information systems – all using free software. It was also very important to adapt the campus to the European Higher Education Area and new undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Solution

Following analysis and in direct collaboration with the teaching staff and all relevant departments in the University, including student end-users, IThinkUPC designed an award-winning learning platform based on Moodle, ATENEA, that currently provides online learning to over 35,000 students and has an annual enrolment growth of 20%. The ATENEA campus manages 10,000 classrooms each academic year and serves over 80 million pages a month. It was one of the first 24×7 services offered by the UPC and has delivered an excellent performance.

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