Good morning. It's okay. So welcome to UNED. I'm going to explain
a little bit what are we doing in the technological center.
As you know, UNED is a university that
does almost everything but exams on remote.
And so the technological center has the duty of having everything
up and running every day for our almost 200,000 students.
So this is more or less a picture of what we
have in the center. So we have several areas.
One of the biggest ones is development because most of
the software that we use is developed in-house by us.
We have an area, a very important area,
obviously, which is the web platform.
All the students, all the professors, all
the people working in the university works... What's going on here?
How can I... Okay, they are going to change that.
Well, we have the web platform. We have...
Okay, the learning management system, obviously, which
is very important for us because everything is there.
We have an area, also very important, new technologies because we have to be
always looking for new things, new developments, new areas, new technologies...
that can serve the university.
And on the, let's say, on the support
platform, we have the systems and databases.
Obviously, we have a very huge data center and we
have a big database to serve all the community.
Communications and security, obviously, is very, very
important, especially security, as you can imagine.
And we have transversal services that
help all the other areas to communicate.
And a very important part of our service, which is the
customer support center, because we have 200,000 people calling
because they have a problem with accessing to a certain
tool or they have forgotten their password, whatever.
So, during the last three years, we have had a very big help from the European community in
the sense of the funding that has been used to renew or to improve the economy of Europe.
And we have had a lot of help from that side.
So, we are devoted to create a university that is agile, flexible,
sustainable, and that can be accessed, and this is the sense of this image,
from any kind of tool, not only a computer, but
your mobile phone, your tablet, or whatever.
So, we are, with the idea of the students in the center of the whole thing, we
have a complete environment that is devoted to give service to these students.
And we have, then, very important areas, as I said, cyber security, sustainability,
mobile, using the mobile, etc., digital integration, digital administration,
eliminating all the paperwork and everything is computer, data-centric,
and all the services of the university go around this idea.
So, what are the main projects that we do in the university?
Well, one of the main ones, at least for the students, is obviously
the learning management system, which is called Agora here,
and is based on OpenLMS, which is a model platform, but with support.
So, that was very important for us, the idea to have a standard open source tool, but supported
by a company that gives us the security that we have on-time responses to our Artemis.
A new website, we have gone from the old system,
and we are still implementing a new technology.
Digital administration, as I said, is very, very important. In fact, it
is a kind of requirement of the Spanish law to have everything digital.
The new technology, as I said, is very, very important because we need to be up to
date in technology and to have everything as new and as performance as possible.
Obviously, high-performance infrastructures, very big data centers, as I said, where
we have renewed more or less everything, and cyber security and communications.
So, what about the learning management system?
As you can see here in this slide, it is something that we implement
during several years. It is not something you can do in one day, obviously.
We started in 2022 with several pilot subjects, and now we have all the grades, all the master degrees, everything
except some of the micro-credentials, etc., that are being implemented during this year and probably the next one.
That means we have 160,000 users of this platform
today, and it will be incremented during the next year.
And we have trained all the universities on this platform through the IUED, which
is the unit that gives support and training for all the people in the university.
The customer support center is essential because, as you can imagine, implementing
something completely new gives a lot of trouble, but working as a team, we can succeed.
It is a cloud solution based on Moodle, accessible, and this is very, very important for us because we have a lot of students
with disabilities in this university because of our characteristics, the preferred university for people with problems.
And so we have to get a very high standard of accessibility. Everything is
secure and protected, so the data is not available for people not authorized.
Responsive, intuitive navigation, so you can access to this platform from your mobile, your
tablet, everything, and it's always working, it's always visible, you can always work on that.
This is a cloud service, so you have high availability and scalability as needed, and it's
interoperable with all the rest of the systems of the university, that means all the rest of the IT.
So we are now consolidating this, we have, for example, all the tutorials of the university are
there, we can grade all the students, we have a special home design look and feel for all the courses,
everything looks in the same way and the
students see every time the same thing.
We are implementing things to obtain data from this tool to prevent, for example, the abandonment of students or
to know when a student is going to have problems, so we can take action and try to avoid problems on this side.
Obviously, there is some deep-plugging, some software, which is a standard product in the market and another
one which is in-house developed, and we have a tool to check the accessibility of everything that we do,
so we can detect problems, so we can detect
elements that are not correctly accessible.
And to help us, we have an ecosystem which is comprised by another
part of the university, which are, for example, the associated centers.
In the university we have all the campuses here in Madrid, but we have
associated centers all over the Spanish territory and even abroad.
And these centers collaborate in helping
the students in their different needs.
We have certain applications that help us, for
example, with the grading of exams or things like that.
And these are all integrated with us.
So, on the new website, we have gone from a very old system based
on Oracle Portal to Magnolia, a new content management system,
and this helps us to have a very standard website where all the information
is taken from the databases, so everything is up to date, always up to date.
We don't have old pages that remain with all information, and again, it is
responsive, accessible, because, as I said, this is very crucial for this university.
There are different campuses for each of the communities, one
for the students, one for the workers, one for the professors,
one for the professors that do not belong to the
university but give tutorials in the associated centers.
So, we are working to have all the best possible
visibility in the world using the techniques.
On digital administration, we have everything digital.
Just to give you an idea, we have like 140 applications
developed in-house that cover all the aspects of the university,
from enrollment to payroll to all kinds
of help that can get a student, etc.
So, obviously, enrollment is the big one because it is where the money comes, but, for example,
electronic signature, everything is electronic in the university, there is no paper anywhere.
Accounting, HR, everything is digital.
And also, of course, the works that the students have to do at the end of the
grade or at the end of the master, everything is done in an electronic way.
They are presented in teams or meetings or things like that.
So, everything is completely automated.
We have implemented, for example, technology, this
comes from the Department of New Technologies,
but now, obviously, it is incorporated into
the mainstream work, for example, blockchain.
It started with some proof of concept elements and now we have, for
example, access to exams or giving microcredentials to students.
It is done using this technology.
We are implementing a very big project for robotic process automation,
so we are discovering all the processes in the
university that can be automated in a certain way.
So, we can use robots, software robots that can implement this kind of processes and avoid using the
time of people to do repetitive tasks or things that can be more easily done in an automatic way.
So, we are on one side discovering all these
processes and we are implementing all of them.
So, new technologies, as I said, are very important because
RPA or blockchain come from that part of the business,
but we implement also, for example, all
the control of these rooms, for example,
is done through applications that we have developed to ask for
the support of the people that manage the computers, the screens,
to set up the heating or the air conditioning,
to check that nobody else is using the room, etc.
So, all that stuff is automated using our own applications.
And going back to the support of all these tools, obviously, are
supported in a big infrastructure of computer infrastructure.
This is in Las Rozas, a small village
going to the north-west of the city.
And there we have high availability for all the systems, more than 600 virtual
servers running all the applications, all the elements of the university.
We have technology for immutable copies, so we are protected
against any kind of ransomware attack or something like that.
And just to give you an idea, we are managing like 6 petabytes of information
that has to be maintained, we have to make all the security backups, etc.
On top of that, we are building, it is almost finished,
another data processing center that will be around this area.
And this will serve as a second copy for the main data processing center.
So, if there is any big catastrophe in the big one, we will have this
disaster recovery center ready to maintain all the services of the university.
We have implemented what we call the Research Cloud, which is equipment
that will help all the community, all the professors in the university,
to build their own servers for their
research projects, etc., in an automated way.
So, you just go to the website and say I need
a server with this many CPUs, this memory, etc.
And it is prepared in an automated way and then you get an email saying,
ok, you can access your equipment in this place, this is the password.
We have implemented new technology, flash technology for backups.
So, we have, as I said, for the main elements, a 4 petabyte
system that gives us all the security that we need.
And we are experimenting with some servers for artificial intelligence
with 2800 NVIDIA GPUs that help us to implement some different projects.
For example, we are doing one project which is giving subtitles to all
the videos, to all the teaching classes that we have in the university.
And, as you can imagine, we have a lot.
So, it is important to have very powerful systems to do this.
So, the security, as you can imagine, this is very, very important.
Everything today in the network is under risk
because there is always someone trying to attack.
So, one of the first things is creating a culture of security.
So, we spend a lot of time and money in creating this culture in the university,
in helping people to understand what they can do, what they cannot do,
what is the safest way of doing things, etc.
This is very, very important because in the end people
are the real barrier against the people who attack us.
We have obviously firewalls with IPS, Intrusion Prevention System.
We have some network proofs that come from the CCN.
CCN is the SPICE agency in Spain.
So, they give us this service.
And we have implemented XDR from Palo
Alto in all the systems of the university.
So, we can know more or less in real time if there is any risk associated
to the computer equipment of any professor or any worker of the university.
And we are implementing the multi-factor
for the logging into the university.
And as I said before, associated centers are very, very important for
us because they give us the presence in all the places where we are not.
And so, we have to ensure that they have all the
best possible tools, especially the communications.
So, we work to give communications to all these people.
For example, on the customer support center, the customer support center
that gives us to all the community personalized attention to the users.
For example, using WhatsApp, we have special
elements to help people with disabilities.
We can use English to the assistance, etc.
So, we are trying always to give the best possible service to the people.
For example, we have implemented chatbots that help students, for example, with the
enrolling process, educational video peels for any kind of things that we consider
when we get a certain number of calls regarding a certain subject, we prepare video peels
to make sure that everybody really understands what is going on and how to do things, etc.
And regarding the associated centers, we have done a project implementing WiFi 6.0,
like 1340 antennas in these centers, so they have the best possible WiFi service.
We have also delivered interactive hubs, I mean,
big screens to use for teaching classes, etc.
And for the exams, as I said, we do the exams in physical exams,
so the students have to go to a certain place and do the exam.
But we have developed a very nice technology in the sense that when the students go to a certain
center where there is going to be exams, they go for any kind of studies, any kind of grades.
And when the student presents his or her identification, there are printers
that print immediately the exam that corresponds to that particular person.
And we say, ok, you have to go to table number whatever, you do the exam, when
the exam is finished, it is delivered to the people taking care of the exam,
and this exam is immediately scanned and is delivered to the
professor that is going to correct or to review the exam.
So it is a very nice process, very complicated from a
technological point of view, but it is very, very interesting.
And in fact, other parts of the Spanish administration have asked us
to sell this technology so they can use it for their own purposes.
And more or less this is what I wanted to share with you.
I hope this gives you an idea of what the
Technology Center does for the University.
And if you have any questions, I will be glad to answer.
Thank you very much. It was indeed very impressive and from an infrastructure
perspective, it is also very much impressive and we have lots to learn.
I have two particular questions regarding the Open LMS, which you said,
and during a couple of years you said that you've been reinventing it.
My question is regarding the approach in a team, how you did it together with the technical
guys and the educators themselves, because sometimes there is a resilience, how you did it.
And another question is regarding the examination center software. As far as I
understood, this is your novelty, your technology. This is not a part of LMS, right?
Regarding the Open LMS, it is a very big project because, as you can imagine,
we have to teach 1,500 professors, 6,000 professors for the tutorials,
and 200,000 students. So, it is not a simple thing.
So, in the first phases, as I said, we used several pilot elements, pilot
subjects, so we saw everything that was going well, was not going so well, etc.
So, we adapted and we created training courses for the people. So, there
were training courses for all the professors and the tutorial professors.
And these were recorded, so anyone could
review all this information whenever needed.
And also, there were a lot of video pills generated, so you have access
to 60 or 80 video pills explaining all the different elements, etc.
This does not mean that we haven't had a lot of calls of professors
saying "I don't find whatever". In the old system there was something,
and they said "Well, in the new system there is not this thing, this
is different, you have to, you know, changing is always difficult".
But it was not possible to sustain the old system because
it has limitations that were not possible to overcome.
So, sometimes you have to suffer a little bit to improve.
And, sorry, but the second question was?
The tool of the examination centre that was developed by your team. This is
your novelty, right? This is not a part of LMS, this is like a different...
Well, it is something that we have, an
examination system, something we have developed.
So, for example, there is a team, imagine that this is an exam
room, there will be a team here, which are the professors in charge,
they have, with their identification, they can access 5 minutes
before to a web where they can open, let's say, the exams,
because they are closed and secure to avoid any kind of cheating.
So, you access them and then you can start receiving people,
printing the exams, etc. So, it is a complicated story.
Thank you very much. And one quick question, and then I give the mic.
How many degree holders do you have
after the new LMS system was implemented?
If you know the figures, I mean, the bachelor's degree,
master's degree, whoever finalised their studies.
I'm sorry, but... How many degree holders do you have
after you implemented the new LMS system?
How many? Sorry, I cannot hear.
How many students or diplomas you already
preceded, bachelor's degree or master's degree?
Students, in total, like 200,000.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much for an interesting presentation.
I have a question regarding your exams.
So, it's very interesting.
Why have you decided to have paper-based exams?
For example, in our case, our students
pass the exams all electronically.
They come to the exam centre, then they enter special codes
and they write their exams or tests or whatever electronically.
So, it's very interesting. What was the decision based on when
you decided to give them paper-based exams, not electronic ones?
Well, this is the way it has been decided to do it.
Because if you don't use this method, I suppose you
are limited to test exams or something like that.
But I see here our expert on the subject that
probably can answer better this question.
Thank you.
Because I know about the technology, but
why we do that is not so simple for me.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. I know we are out of time, but
how people with disabilities are integrated?
Are they part of an ongoing class and
they see everything the way they prefer?
Or they should be part of a special class relevant to their disability?
For example, if they need to pass exams,
they cannot see, they need to pass exams.
Will everything automatically be translated to that system?
Or if I don't hear, will I be attending class or taking
content, professor advised, but listening but not reading?
So, how disabilities integrate?
Well, we have different tools in our learning
management system to help people with disabilities.
For example, we have a tool that helps
you to read whatever is in the screen.
Or we have tools to help people with disabilities,
vision problems, also to have this kind of help.
But I'm part of the same group where other students...
No, no, no. The tool is there and if
you need it, you use it and that's it.
Thank you.
There is another question before a second panelist.
Many of the questions that you have, the two last questions,
will be answered by our expert in this area, okay?
In the second part.
Okay.
Thank you, Emilio.
Thank you. You're welcome.
Thank you.