History of the UOC's Technological Model

We would like in this section to go back in time to recall what the UOC's technological origins were. How many students started their studies in 1995? What type of access did they use? What was the University network like then? How did it evolve?

With this small compilation of historical information you will get to form an idea of the origins and the technological concerns of the University.

The Services and the Network of the UOC

In the academic year 1995-1996 the UOC launched its teaching activity by means of a pilot course with 200 students. The computing infrastructure at the time was formed by the following elements:

		Access to the Internet by means of the Scientific Ring.
		Access to the UOC by means of a rack of modems (30 simultaneous connections).
		The internal network was formed by the PCs of the UOC's staff, by the Novel file and printer servers, and by an academic management server (SIGMA) over a Solaris platform.
		SAC network (Access to Campus System) which had:   --The campus servers (First Class software over Apple platform) supporting a concurrence of 20/30 users.   --The primary and secondary DNS servers (the first Solaris machines).
		The routers linking up these four sub-networks.

The following year (1996-1997), the number of students grew to 1,500. We developed our own integrally Web-based application over a Solaris platform. A virtual campus 2.0 was used supporting a concurrence of more than 100 users. The system was made up of a disk server and an Oracle database, and two identical front-end processors where the web server* and the CV application resided.

Students obtained access o the UOC through Telefónica's Infovía service, with a 2Mb wide band.

The firewall was then launched (CheckPoint's firewall 1) and a radial structure was given to the network so that all the traffic between the sub-networks had to go through the firewall.

A customised application was developed for academic management (GAT), and the UOC's virtual library was launched with VTLS in a Solaris environment.

The internal network migrated from NOVEL to NT.

In the following years new services were added, and those already existing were extended. Then the supracampus appeared (various VC environments for the different teaching communities grouped in the same Intranet application). New links to the Internet were also enabled (UUNET, IBERNET). The UOC turned into an Internet Autonomous System (September 2000) and protocol BGP4 was used to balance out Internet traffic.

Historical Evolution of Management Applications

The main concern which the UOC had during the initial years (year 1995) was to find the approach that would solve academic management. After evaluating the possibility of using some of the academic management applications already existing, it was thought that it would be very difficult for them to fulfil the needs of a virtual university. It was decided therefore to apply development of our own.

During the time taken to develop the GAT (1996-1997), the Sigma product was used and a developer was added to it to allow matriculation on line, which became available in 1996 (the first matriculation of this kind was carried out with Filemaker, and SIGMA was introduced later). Other developments were also carried out to provide support to the introduction and consultation of marks.

Meanwhile, PC solutions were being used for finance management (Conta 3 in 1995, and Dimoni the years 1996 and 1997), and for the collection of students payments, SIGMA was used. TREN was developed simultaneously, and a good part of its functionality was already available in 1997.

At the end of 1997 GAT was launched, and during 1998, the finance management of Ross Systems, and GAT links to this finance management, were also launched.

As regards library applications, a PL/SQL* development was made over the first version of OAS, and it operated during 1995 and part of 1996, at which time VTLS was implemented together with the loan application.

As from 1998 the remaining developments have been carried out, and they have been gradually integrated into the already-existing ones.

The History of the Computer Help Service

The Computer Help Service has been present since the beginnings of the University in order to provide help to students, teaching staff, and management staff. It has experienced an evolution as far as the number of its users goes, and also in respect of the variety and quantity of initiatives that have been carried out.

At the beginning, the Service had already divided into two levels of attention: a first level consisted in a telephone service, and the second more specialised level was made up of UOC technicians.

As regards the number of users, at the start of the University, use of the Computer Help Service was notably higher. During the UOC's first academic year, in 1995, the Help Service was mostly used for remote connection with UOC equipment and was based on telephone attention, and support through the use of e-mail.

In 1997 the incident management application was launched. This application allowed, through a database, a greater management of incidents and the suppression of the use of e-mail messages among users, the Help Service, and the UOC's technicians.

Educational Intranet

The Virtual Campus supporting the UOC's learning environment emerged out of the following premises:

		To have functionalities trying to emulate a face-to-face campus.
		To work on the concept of campus, not on that of e-mail.
		To promote non-coincidence in space and time.
		To guarantee the identity of users.
		Possibility of making known "what people are about" at a given time.
		To cover the need to maintain a historical record of messages.

The Educational Intranet has evolved with time with different versions of software:

	Version 2.3:		CGIs*
			High level of problems with the Oracle BDDs
			Low level of concurrence
	Version 2.6:		CGIs
			Less problems with Oracle BDDs
			Higher level of concurrence
			MH* is finally detached from the code
	Version 3.0:		Daemon in multithreading
			Few problems with Oracle BDDs
			Very high level of concurrence
			Queues to access the database
			Monolithic architecture (all the services together, C++)

The UOC, a University with International Recognition

The UOC has been awarded various prizes of international recognition for its task in online education:

		ICDE prize for the best virtual and distance university of the world.
		WITSA 2000 prize for the best digital initiative.
		Bangemann Challenge European Union Award for the best European initiative in distance education.

*MH is the public software of the mail system used by the UOC. The objective was to detach the two codes through API in order to refine errors and to allow an eventual migration.