# Atenea Exams, an IMS LTI Application to Solve Scalability Problems: A Study Case
## 3 Solution and Results
### Atenea Exams  
Once we have explained the architecture of Atenea we are going back to one of the problems we faced when turning to online learning: the possible overload because of a massive use of the Quiz Moodle module. A possible solution would have been to create a duplicate of Atenea to conduct the quizzes, this would have involved creating duplicates of all courses, with all student registrations, which presents a lot of technical problems regarding data integrity. It would also generate different entry points to courses and places to take an exam, creating a worse user experience for the students. Another problem is the synchronization of student grades. If we were to have two Ateneas: where can the student find her or his grades? The solution chosen was to deploy a high-performance version of the Moodle Quizz Module As A Service, to plug-and-play within the university's LMS without drawing on its internal resources, solving the possible overload problem. This would be implemented by a new Moodle acting as an LTI Provider, so that the teachers create the questionnaires there and connect them with the Atenea courses where they teach their subjects as an External Activity. This LTI service would be supported by a new high-performance standalone Moodle instance that could support a hypothetical maximum load of 9000 simultaneous connections. This new instance was called Atenea Exams, making clear its purpose. Atenea Exams was mounted following the same system architecture as Atenea: 2 load balancers, 6 front-end, a dedicated server for the database. All virtualized in virtualization clusters in the private cloud. The only difference is that the drive bay used is a new high-performance drive with all the high-speed SSDs, which has already been purchased but not deployed into production. Atenea Exams is not set as a copy of Atenea the LMS, is just a LTI Provider that offers the Moodle Quiz Activity and the Task Activity like a SaaS. The professor creates the Quiz in his course in Atenea Exams, publishes it as a LTI Activity using the Moodle LTI Provider feature and sets it up in Atenea using the Moodle External Tool (LTI Consumer) activity module. In Figure 10 we present an overview of the interaction between Atenea Exams and Atenea. Atenea Exams is a platform set up only for the purpose of publishing quizzes as LTI Applications, Atenea is the LMS already in production. Let us analyze how it works:  
1. The professor logs in Atenea Exams, there she finds a course with the same name and code as the one she is teaching in Atenea. This course is empty. There she can create a quiz, either from scratch or importing it from a backup file from her Atenea course. 2. Using the Moodle LTI Provider plugin the professor publishes the quiz as a LTI application. 3. The professor logs onto Atenea. 4. She goes to her course and creates an External Tool activity as shown in Fig 2. and binds the activity to the quiz she has created in step 2. 5. The students log in Atenea, access their course and click on the External Tool activity. 6. The activity redirects the student to Atenea Exams, where the student is automatically logged in by the LTI protocol, and the student can take her test. With LTI external activities the students find the questionnaires transparently, as they would do with another quiz in the Atenea course. And the grades are set back in the Atenea gradebook. However, the complication of creating questionnaires in Atenea Exams, publishing them as an LTI activity and incorporating them as an external activity in the Atenea course is completely passed on to teachers. This is not trivial, if we consider the situation: more than learning how to do online lectures for a course where the workload is already very high, the move to teleworking (often working with each teacher's particular equipment and internet connections) and in confinement situation, competing for spaces, resources, and quiet moments to work with other family members, often also confined students.