‘Learn from the community’ is a series of articles to highlight real-life project scenarios covered in Show & Tell interviews on our Microsoft 365 Developer YouTube channel. It’s a great opportunity to get inspired by the end-to-end solutions built with the Microsoft Cloud and get excited for your next project.

In our first ‘Learn from the community’ scenario, a group of students from University College London joined me to talk about challenges that universities and colleges were facing during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of tracking the attendance and engagement of their students. Institutes needed a course monitoring system to provide teachers and learning administrators a better way of managing students in their courses, not just during the pandemic.

Project ORCA is designed by this group of students to complement the online learning tools with attendance and engagement monitoring features. ORCA (Online Register for Classes with Analytics) integrates with Microsoft Teams and Moodle to generate visual reports based on student attendance and engagement metrics. ORCA then provides these reports to the relevant teaching staff. In this project, there are four main technology pillars:

• Microsoft Graph plays a significant role in terms of gathering students’ participation in lectures held on Microsoft Teams.
• Moodle Adapter helps gather information about student activities through a plugin.
• SharePoint lists store the incoming information as a common format to be consumed in the report later.
• Power BI is consumed for creating visual reports.
• ORCA is an open-source project that can be automatically deployed to Azure or on-premises to be reused by other institutes.

Learn more about the project 🚀👉

Useful Links

📌 ORCA

📚 Microsoft Learn

📃 Microsoft Docs