Information about the 'Elly Platforms for Education and Training' service

Service Description

The Elly platforms are Moodle environments designed to offer a space for management and interaction with the teaching materials of the degree courses, master's degree courses and other institutional training courses of the University of Parma and, at the same time, to enable the delivery of e-learning teaching, both in 'blended' mode and in distance mode.

In order to promote the use of the platform and the dissemination of e-learning teaching projects, SELMA organizes regular training meetings for users (teachers, technical administrative staff, collaborators and students) and provides assistance through the operation of a front office (remote support) for all users.

There will be two Elly platforms as of the academic year 2024/2025, in accordance with the new configuration of the University Departments:

- elly.didattica (https://elly2024.didattica.unipr.it/), the portal dedicated to the degree courses of the 10 Departments, the Assessment of Initial Preparation, the services of the University Language Centre, Postgraduate Studies and the University Libraries;

- elly.formazione (https://elly2024.formazione.unipr.it/), where compulsory online courses for students, lecturers and technical-administrative staff on Safety at Work and all other areas of lifelong learning are provided. In addition, the portal also hosts training courses for users from outside the University (e.g. teacher training School, other professional training courses) or for Foundation Year, for foreign students/staff entering the University of Parma.

It is possible to envisage the opening of new Elly service instances/platforms specifically dedicated to critical and strategically important areas related to university teaching.

To whom the service is addressed

The service is offered to a variety of internal and external users. “Internal" users are all students, lecturers and technical-administrative staff belonging to Departments, Schools, Management Areas, UOC Libraries, UOS Language Skills, Centre for Services in Health, Hygiene and Safety in the Workplace, other University Centres. Access to the platforms is granted to these users through the IDEM (IDEntity Management) system for federated access, with the credentials of the University or federated institution or, alternatively, with SPID. “External" users are those who access the service at the request of qualified users (lecturers or UO managers) for specific training activities. Access to the platform for these users is granted through the creation of manual profiles. Additional external users can access specific content, which is open on the platforms, without the need for authentication (guest profile) and are enabled only to consult the material.

IDEM (IDEntity Management) for federated access

It is an authentication service allowing users of academic and research institutions that are part of the federation to use their own credentials (those used in their own institution) to access the federated resources of all participating institutions as well.

Since 1 April 2009, the IDEM Federation has been active at the GARR Consortium with the aim of setting up the Authentication and Authorisation infrastructure of the GARR network.

Notes on the release of attributes for the use of IDEM-GARR-AAI federated authentication for the University of Parma

The credentials to access the services provided by the IDEM-GARR-AAI Federation and the internal services offered through the Service Provider of the University of Parma are private and cannot be passed on anyone for any reason and under any title.

The user must be aware that the authentication system issues the external service provider with a number of LDAP attributes that are indispensable for authentication and in the absence of which the requested service cannot be provided.

These attributes are:

email: user's email address;

givenName: First name of the user;

surname: Surname of the user;

eduPersonPrincipalName: 'scoped' attribute derived from the id. The scoped attributes are derived from the base attributes with the organisation suffix added;

eduPersonAffiliation: Degree of affiliation within the organisation;

eduPersonScopedAffiliation: Scoped derived from the previous one. The scoped attributes are derived from the base attributes with the addition of the organisation suffix.

eduPersonTargetedID: value automatically calculated by our IdP (persistent)

Service Management

The service is provided by the University of Parma and is managed by the University E-learning and Multimedia Service Centre (SELMA Centre) https://selma.unipr.it/.

SELMA guarantees the proper functioning of the Elly (front-end) portals and, in particular, it is its responsibility to:

- adopt the best solutions so that end-users are able to use e-learning services properly;

- provide assistance in solving problems with e-learning services (helpdesk);

- upload the updated educational offer and constantly monitor the proper functioning of the portals, the resources uploaded therein and the accessibility for users;

- plan, design and coordinate the annual updates of the Elly platforms.

Some service activities are provided in collaboration with other University UOs, in particular with the Information Systems Area. ASI's technical and IT support consists in carrying out (or coordinating with the contribution of external partners) the following activities:

- support for the design of the 'moodle' base instance;

- support for the installation of system updates and possible plug-ins on the platforms;

- support for the cloning of the elly.didattica and elly.formazione portals;

- support for the uploading of the Educational Offer and teaching responsibilities;

- support for the design of the server infrastructure and for the resolution of any technical problems.

User support

The support service is provided on demand, through a ticket management system via the contact e-mail: supporto.elly@unipr.it.

The service is available from Monday to Thursday, from 8.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., and on Fridays from 8.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. As a rule, requests are taken care of within 48 working hours.

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