Platforms and Services

Moodle

Moodle is EPFL’s main Learning Management System. It is maintained by central IT services. It features resources and materials for more than 1’500 courses taught at EPFL. Each course has its Moodle site. We’ve created a Moodle Course Template which illustrates how a well designed course looks like for students. The Moodle Activity Reference provides advice about useful components to add to your Moodle course.

Swiss MOOC Service

The Swiss MOOC Service is the local platform we operated by the Center for Digital Education and used mainly for EPFL’s students. It is gouverned by the Swiss MOOC Service association, that we co-founded with ETH and offers a safe environment with regards to personal data protection, free courses and no advertisement. Contact: Anne Helsdingen

Video production facilities

The Center for Digital Education operates 2 studios with editing staff ready for EPFL teachers. We can produce high quality videos for entire MOOCs (apply to a call from the DRIL fund), but we can also give you a hand in producing a few lectures for your class, or edit classroom recordings. See for example Jean-Cédric Chappelier’s lectures for CS-119(d) Information, calcul, communication. Check out this example produced in our lightboard recording facility. Contact: Christian Vonarburg

Kaltura

Kaltura is EPFL’s video hosting service which is administered by central IT services. See our documentation about how to request a channel and upload your videos or direclty request a channnel.

Graphsearch

The EPFL Graph project is an initiative of the Center for Digital Education (CEDE) and the CHILI Lab, created with the goal of opening up academic content to the EPFL community. The Vice Presidency for Academic Affairs considers that EPFL Graph is of strategic importance to the institution, and is actively supporting its evolution from a research project into a fully-fledged IT service for the whole EPFL community. The main product is a web application called Graph Search. The website runs on top of an AI-powered engine that leverages machine learning, natural language processing and graph theory to provide fast semantic search and data-driven recommendations to our students, researchers and administrators. Contact: Francisco Pinto

Ed Discussion

The use of online discussion forums has increased a lot during the pandemic period, and has sustained afterwards. Students use forums to ask questions about lectures and exercises. Some instructors also use the Polling capabilities of EdStem to ask questions during their lectures. Ed Dicsussion can be seamlessly embedded as a component (LTI) into your Moodle course and is also accessible directly via single sign-on (SSO). Learn how to use Ed Discussion to run exercise sessions and live lectures at EPFL.

Jupyter Notebooks – NOTO

NOTO is EPFL’s centralised Jupyter Notebook infrastructure operated by the Center for Digital Education. It gives students a free working space, featuring Pyhton, R, Octave and specialised kernels. It is preloaded with most of the libraries used in the lectures. Many of our professors have developed notebooks that can be direclty loaded into NOTO. Visit our dedicated webiste for use cases and best practices. Contact: [email protected]

Exoset – Exercises and Solutions

Exoset was initially developed as a DRIL project in collaboration with the Physics section (see the fund for Digital Resources for Instruction and Learning). The platform is currently maintained by the Center for Digital Education. Exoset is a database of exercises that contains more than 500 exercises, indexed by difficulty and topic. For example, this basic physics exercise is about an explosion and addresses the “Kinetic theory of gases” with a “Standard” level of difficulty. Contact: Jean-Marie Fürbringer (project lead) & Maria Di Vincenzo (development and sysadmin).

Learning Companion

Reflect and get recommendations from the companion. Students self-assess their learning habits and discover their strengths and find out what they could improve. Try it out by filling the first questionnaire on auto-regulation skills. Contact: Patrick Jermann

Clickers – Student Response System

The CAPE team (Teacher support center) provides help in using Turning Point’s Student Response Systems. These tools encourage students to participate in class by allowing them to submit responses to interactive questions. Student can submit answers with a connected device (smartphone, laptop…).

Automatic paper exam correction

The CePro team provides advice regarding the preparation and correction of paper-based exams. Two platforms are available: AMC (Auto Multiple Choice) and Ans which facilitate the correction of multiple choice as well as open questions.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

The VDI infrastructure at EPFL is operated by <a href="central IT services. The configuration of a virtual image is done in collaboration between instructors and faculty IT services. A number of IT rooms feature thin clients that can be used to run VDI environments. The VDI infrastructure is also used to run exams.

Poseidon – IT support for students and discounted laptops.

Poseidon is a service operated by central IT services and offers an IT help desk for students. The service troubleshoots problems with personal laptops and offers buying advice for new devices. Poseidon’s catalogue of discounted professional laptops is available to students and collaborators from several Swiss schools. Students can also borrow accessories such as display adapters and laptop chargers from Poseidon for a short duration.