Meeting the demand for virtual education in Ecuador

In Ecuador, all educational institutions began to use virtual education platforms, video-learning methodologies, and software tools during the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, however it was a technological and cultural challenge to satisfy the demand for usage by students and teachers.

CEDIA has developed academic services that facilitate and optimise the implementation, support, licensing, and use of different educational technologies by CEDIA institutional members. In this context, usage of the advanced distributed learning platform for virtual education increased exponentially during 2020.

The platform is hosted on CEDIA cloud infrastructure, which is supported by alternate electrical energy, storage, backups, immediate response systems to failures, and contingency sites. A distributed architecture was implemented to facilitate scaling and to automate deployment processes of the open-source learning platform Moodle.

Currently, the platform hosts 23 higher education institutions with approximately 240 thousand enrolled students, allowing member institutions to solve problems such as the limited capacity of technological resources, knowledge of e-learning methodologies, best technologies practices, etc. The platform optimises the availability, support, training, and use of virtual educational platforms in the country and is being used by institutions from other NRENs such as CUDI, the Mexican NREN.

The Autonomous University of Chiapas (Mexico) migrated its Moodle platform to the CEDIA advanced distributed learning platform during the pandemic period.

The platform continues to grow and improve with technologies that allow the automation of processes and resources, making the use of academic services easier, and establishing inter-institutional collaboration among CEDIA members and NRENs, to maintain and enhance the quality of education.