ORCA is an open-source software solution which helps academic institutions assess the effectiveness of online learning by analyzing data on students’ attendance and engagement with online platforms and content. As a group of students at University College London (UCL), we had the chance to develop ORCA through UCL's Industry Exchange Network (IXN) programme in collaboration with Microsoft as part of a course within our degree.
Guest post by team leads Lydia Tsami and Omar Beyhum
Although we’re currently busy working on our dissertation projects as part of our degrees, 2 of our developers – Lydia Tsami and Omar Beyhum – are joining Ayca Bas from the Microsoft 365 Advocacy team in this webinar to talk about how we designed, developed, and delivered ORCA.
What is ORCA?
ORCA is designed to complement the online learning and collaboration tools of schools and universities, most notably Moodle and Microsoft Teams. In brief, it can generate visual reports based on student attendance and engagement metrics, and then provide them to the relevant teaching staff. To accomplish this, it leverages Microsoft Graph to cross reference student identities across different platforms and listen to events such as participants joining meetings. Data can be synthesized via templated Sharepoint lists or Power BI dashboards, then shared to the relevant staff members based on an institution’s Azure Active Directory.
You can check the full webinar below if you’re interested in seeing a demo of ORCA in use, how it was implemented, and how to get started with installing it or contributing to the project!
Make your own apps
Keen on developing your own applications on top of services like Teams, Sharepoint, and Microsoft Graph? Make sure to check out these resources, we found them pretty useful when we first got started:
- Microsoft 365 Developer Program: https://aka.ms/M365Developers
- Microsoft Graph Fundamentals: https://aka.ms/learn-graph
- Develop apps with the Microsoft Graph Toolkit: https://aka.ms/learn-mgt
- Develop apps for Microsoft Teams: https://aka.ms/learn-teams-apps
