The overview of WIUT to overcome COVID-19 [:] Information Technology Side

 

COVID-19 has forced us to speed up ten times faster, to turn our half way online support into 100% ONLINE TEACHING.

COVID-19

March 13^th, the day I created an emergency TM group by the request of WIUT rector and we started discussing contingency plan.  

March 15^th, the government has announced quarantine measures.  The next steps were to purchase Zoom account and try to continue teaching. However, were we (both teachers and students) ready for that kind of teaching and learning? Could dean’s office manage all the teaching classes? Attendance? By Time-Table? What about assessment? Many questions have been raised.  The good thing is, we did not panic and completed our academic year with online take-home exams.  To enable that IT had to immediately fine-tune the existing WIUT Intranet coursework submission system into take-home exam and re-launch it.

Initial Challenges

Now, what was the next challenge? The good thing is admission was online and we had already many applicants registered. Having that, how were we going to conduct entrance-exams in summer? Moreover, how were we going to start the academic year? was it going to be online? If so what was the platform we were going to use? Were we capable to create one with an existing software engineers, conduct proper trainings and manage server side to handle thousands of simultaneous users? Indeed, there were many more questions, but with no answers yet. These were some of the questions which were spinning around on my mind, and I believe not only mine.

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Entrance exam platform

The first thing is first, we started analyzing assessment platforms and none came up to be easy to integrate with an existing system and customization. In addition, the price for the partially done product companies asking were very high. Thus, we started implementing our own assessment platform. It was supposed to support both objective and subjective type of questions, including easy to use math formulas, since our coming entrance exams were indeed math exams. It also had to be integrated with the existing admission system. The implementation came up to be smooth enough with all necessary scripts integration and overall system integration. The only barrier was, invigilation. Online exam without an invigilation may end up with cheatings. So, we started planning/designing our own video-conferencing system, but in a week or so I understood that we will need an open-source easy to integrate platform, since the implementation and testing part may take months or even years.  After reviewing dozens of platforms, we end up selecting BigBlueButton open source solution. The initial integration with the admission and the assessment system took me only a week and I passed the rest of the work to our fabulous team to finish up the work.  We also, created easy to use admin panel for initializing our invigilator, applicants for each exam. The next few weeks, we spend testing and updating the entrance exam platform. Meanwhile, we invited our invigilators to train them how to use the system. However, the real skills came to invigilator after the few mock and real exams.  Besides all these technical updates, trainings and the platform itself, we did not know the applicant’s side of readiness for the online exam. We emailed all applicants with the policy, requirement, usage rules along with video training material of entrance exam.  

The mock exam days has come, which was the moment of truth for all of us. The first mock exam, we end up with chaos from invigilators side and the main server down issue due to incapability of handling this many video-streams. Yes, we did prior calculations of the server capabilities, but we were way off. Instead of getting shocked from collapse, I was so happy to see that in fact the first few hundred applicants who joined our servers, had their HD cameras and microphones working.   Another thing that made me really happy is, our team did not give up at all and believed that IT will resolve the problems in few hours till next mock-exam time the same day.  The solution did not force everyone to wait too long, we increased the number of servers as much as we could and decreased the number of students per exam. The first exam, end up with a flawless victory. In fact, the rest of all exams have been conducted in a high level. Of course, during the examination there were some students who experienced a microphone or camera problems, but overall it was a good.  From my best knowledge, I know this was the first academic online entrance examination conducted in Uzbekistan.

Invigilators monitoring Online Entrance exam, room #2

Math Exam, applicant(test) view

As a conclusion we may watch the speech of our former Rector, Komiljon Karimov about the platforms we have created. The speech points out the main topics such as our internal development team, 98% of entrance exam accuracy, three-page policy and other technological factors. 

Learning Management System

As of today November 2^{nd, 2020},  nobody knows, when the pandemic ends.  We are still in the mode of online teaching.  Our new LMS, allows to manage class materials in an organized way, accept student take home assessments and more. All the lectures and seminars are being provided to students using the video-conference system, which has been deeply integrated with the WIUT LMS. Teachers and students join their video-conference lessons based on WIUT Timetable. Also, teachers are free to create classes any day or time using the re-schedule feature of the system.  LMS also support online examination with video-conference invigilation, inherited from the entrance exam solution.  

Indeed, when we just started the online teaching the first day we faced again hardware scaling problems, but this time the scale was five thousand simultaneous students. In entrance, exam we had our lesson with CPU not being able to handle video-conference math equation and getting overflowed, this time the problem was with the network capabilities our local cloud provider. The problem was resolved by temporary increase of the network bandwidth, later we switched into international cloud provider who supplied us with gigabits of networking capabilities in each cloud server, a lot cheaper.

Video Conference Schedule by academic Time-Table

Another problem we have faced was, the iOS is being protective in some models of their device default browser Safari. We had to ask our students to enable the JavaScript and allow the pop-up windows to get Bigbluebutton features to work.  Bigbluebutton’s advantage of no installation required and supporting any browser turned out to be its disadvantage in this case. However, the quick settings change from a user side does the trick and the problem can be resolved.

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 The number of Video Conference Recording 

                has reached over 6000 within a month!

Overall, the platform has done a very good job. The student responses from course committee meetings were good. In addition, from the server side, IT has been monitoring and witnessing smooth operational workload of the system.

Our Software Development Team

Special thanks to our Administration for supporting and trusting us to do our job.

Former rector of WIUT, now University of Diplomacy, Komilon Karimov

The rector of WIUT, Bakhrom Mirkasimov

The first deputy rector of WIUT, Michael Clarke

Deputy rector of WIUT, Nizom Kadirov

Director of Administration, Jobir Mallabaev

Admission, the bravest girl, Nigora Sunnatova

Registrar Office, Aziza Khakimova

Dean of CIFS, Erkin Mukhammedov

Truly LMS expert, WIUT LMS dev. mentor, Isroil Kurbaniyazov

SAL, activist, Natalie Mikhaylov

All of WIUT staff, who worked together as a great team

And of course our fabulous and supportive students.

And!

Continuing our WIUT anthem: We will We will ROCK YOU!   

Our founder, Abdujabbor Abdusattorovich Abduvohidov