# Atenea Exams, an IMS LTI Application to Solve Scalability Problems: A Study Case
## 1 Introduction  
Atenea is the Virtual Campus of the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) based on the free software Moodle. The Moodle-based version of Atenea has been in operation since 2004, when it replaced the previous Lotus Notes-based environment [1, 2]. The current Atenea is fully integrated into the teaching, enrollment and academic management processes of the university, being the service most valued by the university's teaching and research staff in internal surveys, with an average rating of 3.9 out of 5 obtained in the internal survey among the UPC's faculty answered by 1545 participants with more than a 50% response rate. The project to change the UPC virtual campus to Moodle was proposed and executed by the Institute of Education Sciences of the UPC (ICE) and UPCnet--the ICT service company that provides services and is owned by the university itself. The change meant making an unprecedented decision until 2004: to move a critical service for the university to Open Source technology with General Public License (GPL), without any guarantee or any external company support that was responsible for the system, its maintenance and its evolution. This decision implied that UPC itself with its own resources had to develop the expert knowledge and ability to integrate Moodle into its processes and systems, leverage the platform, organize its processes around and support its users. Time has shown that the decision was right. As a result, UPCNet, the consulting and technology services companycreated by the UPC twenty years ago, opened a new line of business doing consulting and services related to Moodle; in 2019 UPCNet under the new brand IThinkUPC ([[https://www.ithinkupc.com/](https://www.ithinkupc.com/)]([https://www.ithinkupc.com/](https://www.ithinkupc.com/))) became a Moodle Partner. At that time, the decision to adopt Moodle as a technology to implement Atenea, was strongly influenced by the report on the selection process of the Learning Management System (here in after LMS) based in Open Source technologies for the Universitat Jaume I, carried out Center for Education and New Technologies (CENT) which was visited by an UPC delegation [3; 4; 5]. Other factors in favor of the decision include:  
* Moodle is a platform based 100% on web technologies that in 2004 had become a standard. * Moodle design is focused on the needs of teachers, is designed by teachers and developed by a teacher learning community and based on pedagogical principles (constructivism and social constructionism) [6]. * Several UPC professors were already using Moodle for their teaching, with installations of Moodle hosted in PCs in their offices set up and operated by the professors themselves. * At the School of Informatics of the UPC, several final degree projects which aim was to contribute to the code base of the Moodle community, were being developed. Students doing these projects became internal talent of UPC and UPCNet, experts in the environment and active participants in the Moodle community. * Another important influence is the cultural change within the UPC with respect to the free software movement. UPC's Board of Management launched the Chair of Free Software to serve as a vehicle for all the initiatives undertaken by the University in this area. The Chair of Free Software, which was created in September 2004, aimed to raise awareness of Open Source software at UPC and in society at large [7]. During the first four months of the 2005-2006 academic year, a pilot test was carried out with 9 schools, involving 132 subjects, 216 groups and 2908 students. In January 2006, once the testing phase was over, the UPC approved the full implementation of Moodle as the technological platform for the Atenea virtual campus for the next academic year. The adoption of Moodle as a teaching support tool at Atenea was a success, with very few problems considering the level of adoption and size of the university.