Most Australian universities run their units on a learning management system such as Moodle. It does a lot well: the unit site, readings, quizzes, assignment submission, the gradebook. What it can't see is the class itself.
When a lecturer stands in front of a room (or a video call) for an hour, the LMS has no idea who came, who answered a question, who joined in the group task, or who sat at the back and quietly stopped engaging three weeks ago. It sees a login on Sunday night and, eventually, a missing assignment.
Ludoran is built for that hour.
What Ludoran does in the room
A lecturer plans the class as a sequence of short steps: a poll to open, a few slides, a word cloud, an activity in pairs, a quick quiz, a question to finish. In class they step through it on the big screen with a keyboard or presentation clicker. Students join on their phones or laptops with a code or a QR code. There's nothing to install.
Each step appears on the students' screens as the lecturer reaches it. Answers, votes and word clouds land on the big screen as they come in. When the class ends, students get a recap of what happened, with their own answers and notes, and the lecturer has attendance and results without having taken a roll.
Why the live class matters
Turning up is not a formality. A well-known meta-analysis by Credé, Roch and Kieszczynka (2010) found that class attendance is a better predictor of university grades than many other measures, including standardised admission tests and study habits (doi:10.3102/0034654310362998). Attendance alone isn't the whole story, but it's one of the clearest signals there is, and it usually drops before marks do.
That's the gap we wanted to close. A student who has stopped coming to class, or who comes but no longer takes part, is often visible weeks before a missed deadline. If the people who teach and support them can see that early, they can check in while it still makes a difference.
Beside Moodle, not instead of it
We didn't set out to build another LMS. Universities have invested years in Moodle, and staff and students know where things are. Ludoran sits beside it:
- Moodle stays the home of the unit. Readings, submissions and official grades stay where they are.
- Ludoran connects as a standard external tool (LTI 1.3). Students click a link in their Moodle unit and arrive in their Ludoran class, already signed in.
- Class lists come from Moodle, so nobody types them twice.
- Lecturers choose what goes back. Attendance or class points can go to the Moodle gradebook as their own column, only if the lecturer picks them.
- Moodle can share no names at all. In that case students appear in Ludoran under a codename.
What staff see
From the records the class already produces (attendance, taking part in polls and activities, before- and after-class tasks), Ludoran works out a weekly engagement signal for each student in each unit: green, amber or red, always with plain reasons such as "missed 2 of the last 3 classes". It looks at a recent window, not a running total, so a hard first few weeks doesn't follow a student around. It measures taking part, never whether answers were right.
A lecturer can send a kind, editable check-in in one click. Student support staff can see the same picture across units, if the university chooses. Students are told plainly that this happens and why, and can download their own signal with the rest of their data.
Where it's hosted
Ludoran stores its data in Australia (Sydney). It is not sold or used for advertising, and there's no third-party tracking.
What's next
We're working with lecturers to make the class screen faster to plan and calmer to run. If you teach at an Australian university and want to see it, the features page has the detail, and about explains who we are.