Optimizing Educational Workflows: HOGENT’s Journey to Efficient Data Management

Nowadays, schools have to manage more and more data as we move into the digital age of learning. Although these tools can make the life of teachers easier, it also presents them with new challenges. For example, managing data between different tools efficiently.

In 2022, HOGENT decided to start using Ans as its main examination platform.?

HOGENT is the largest University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Flanders, Belgium. They offer a wide range of programmes at eight campuses to over 17,000 students.

During this transition, they wanted to integrate their Learning Management System (LMS) and Student Information System (SIS) with Ans (Exam Software) to optimise their teachers’ workflow. As Sven Vanpoucke, Software analyst and developer at HOGENT explained: “Our teachers don't have to create the courses in Ans, nor do they have to manage the subscriptions for the students. They can focus all their time on the creation of their assessments.”

Sven was in charge of facilitating the data migration process between their old tool and Ans. Next to that, he was responsible for creating the custom integration with Ans. To get some more insight into how they realised this integration, we asked him a few questions.

What was the scope of the integration project?

“The goal of the project was to create a tailormade integration in our LMS to allow a synchronisation for selected courses in our LMS to Ans. I was the only developer for the integration and have spent a month working on the integration.”

How does the integration work?

“Our teachers have a tool in our LMS where they can activate Ans for a specific course. Every 60 minutes our synchronisation tool starts running and synchronises the activated courses in our LMS. The courses are created and the subscriptions from that course are kept in sync. The subscriptions are both retrieved from the LMS directly, as well as from our SIS which contains the official student subscriptions for that specific course. The groups from the LMS and our SIS, with their subscriptions included are also synchronised.

In the tool in our LMS, the teachers can see a detailed log of the synchronisation. They also have a button to start an immediate synchronisation for that specific course. In our synchronisation we cache a few things, like the state of the group subscriptions, to minimise the amount of calls made to the Ans API. By doing this each course is synchronised within 1 to 3 seconds.”

What challenges did you face during this project?

“Firstly, the structure of Groups in our LMS is different from that in Ans. Ans uses a flat structure for groups while we use a hierarchy. We had a few cases in which group names within different parts of our hierarchy were the same which broke the synchronisation. We fixed it by creating unique names (paths and IDs) to our groups.

Secondly, we had to manually delay our hourly synchronisation between each course because we reached the maximum requests limit too often. We now wait for 1 second after the synchronisation of a course to make sure that we don't reach that limit.”

What would you advise other organisations that would like to set up a similar type of integration?

“The (Ans) API offers a lot of possibilities, some of which are quite unique. For example: when you create a course you can add an array with all the subscribed users. This reduces the amount of API methods you have to call. Because of this, you can just push the latest state of the course without doing a diff (comparison of data) between the LMS and Ans. These features are important for creating a performant integration. Try to use these kinds of batch features where possible.”

Conclusion

HOGENT's integration of Ans with their Learning Management System has made a big difference for their teachers. By automating the creation of courses and managing student subscriptions, teachers can now spend more time on teaching and less time on administrative tasks.

While the project had its challenges, like syncing group structures and managing data limits, HOGENT successfully built a solution that works efficiently. This integration shows how the right technology can save time and improve the quality of education, benefiting both teachers and students.

Ans offers a web-based assessment platform that supports digital, hybrid and written assignments. If you would like to know more, visit our website at https://www.ans.app/