Coping with the COVID-19 challenges in a comprehensive university: learning tools and procedures adopted by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, learning rapidly has undergone a digital transformation into eLearning in order to cope with the circumstances of a global outbreak. This paper presents the use of synchronous and an asynchronous service both for teaching and assessment in one of the largest universities of Greece, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh). The transition to eLearning has been achieved through a combination of commercial and open source software tools (mainly Zoom and Moodle). Moodle has reemerged in the AUTh academic community with improved functionalities from various plugins installed to meet the diverse range of pedagogical needs. It also describes the integration of Zoom Meetings solutions using centralized account authentication, i.e. single-sign-on (SSO) for the entire campus. End-user support and training is also provided as a combination of methods to support users on a large scale. We also present figures that highlight the high usage of eLearning systems with an added survey of positive users’ opinion on how Aristotle University has gotten ahead with the pandemic and the architecture designed to balance the workload. Finally, we introduce current and future improvements.