How a University Department Replaced Four Spreadsheets and a Paper Register

The situation

A university department needed to deliver course content and evidence that students had engaged with it. What it had instead was a set of habits: lecture recordings distributed as email attachments and links to a shared drive, attendance taken on paper and typed up later, and four separate spreadsheets that were each authoritative about something slightly different.

The cost was weekly and specific:

• No single place a student could go to find the material for a module
• Attendance reconciled by hand, consuming more than four staff hours every week
• Four spreadsheets holding overlapping records, agreeing with each other only until somebody edited one of them
• No reliable way to answer "did this cohort actually watch this" without asking
• Assessment run separately again, outside the tools the university already used

The manual process it replaced

What was built

Structured lesson delivery. Lessons hang off classes, with video served through a protected streaming pipeline rather than shared as files. Students get a clear route through the material; lecturers get one place to put it.

Attendance without a register. Attendance is captured by QR code and short code, in a two-step scan restricted to campus IP ranges, so presence is recorded at the point it happens instead of transcribed afterwards. This is the change that took the four-plus hours a week out of the process.

Sign-in through Canvas. Students and staff authenticate with their existing Canvas accounts over OAuth and are matched on their Canvas ID, so there is no second set of credentials to issue, forget, or reset.

Roles and consent. Administrator, teacher and student roles with distinct permissions, and a consent gate students pass before any analytics are recorded.

An assessment engine, built later. Quiz authoring, timed sittings, automatic and manual marking, and grade passback straight into the Canvas gradebook, verified working against a live Canvas instance in July 2026. It ships with a substantial automated test suite, because a bug that silently loses a student's submitted answers is not a bug you find by clicking around.

What changed

• The register stopped being a job. Attendance is a scan, not an afternoon, and the record exists the moment the class does.
• Four spreadsheets became one system. There is no longer a question of which file is right, because there is only one.
• More than four hours a week came back. That is the number the department measured before the change, and it was the whole justification for making it.
• Assessment stopped being a parallel universe. Results land in the gradebook the university already runs on, rather than being exported, emailed, and retyped.

Why this one is on this page

The pattern here is the one I now build deliberately: an organisation with a rigorous academic standard and an improvised administrative layer underneath it, where the fix is not a better spreadsheet but a system that records things once. If that sounds like your admissions, assessment or certification process, that is the subject of the assessment and certification systems page.

The platform runs at vu.luciera.app. The client owns the software; I built it.