A Virtual University is a collection of closely related programs in a digital cloud coupled with client programs on teacher’s and student’s computers. A Virtual University must provide better services than the offline teaching. The latter can be split into four important sections:
• The Direct Teaching
• The Inverse Teaching
• Document’s flows of teachers
• Document’s flows of the Administration.
It is not so difficult to transfer the Direct Teaching to a virtual field. It includes virtual lectures, distributions of teaching materials, in other words, just the information flows from teachers to students. Many complains on Distant Learning Systems are caused by a wrong impression that any DLS reduces to the Direct Teaching only.
Things are different with the Inverse Teaching, since in the ideal case a teacher must be sure that his or her students learned all materials properly. The Inverse Teaching includes the automatic control of student’s location as well as the recording of these data to the cloud. The lectures must be recorded to the cloud and automatically distributed in proper folders. Student’s attendance must be fully controlled and recorded by Artificial Intelligence. A teacher must have an option to determine if a student who missed a class watched its recording or not. Office hours must be scheduled and be fully automatic. A teacher must have an opportunity to see what every student is doing during the test. He or she must also have an option to watch what is going on the student’s screen during important tests. Video recordings of full screens during important tests must be automatically collected by the system. Other control options must be present in the system.
On the Document flow side, all tests must be distributed and collected automatically. Grading must be simple and convenient. Current progress of each student must be recorded. All classes must be run by the system following the schedule.
Administration must have the same abilities to control both students and teachers. In addition, the system must be well defended from the outside intruders, and it must be open for new technologies.
Since teaching practices vary from one university to another, it is hardly possible to create a very simple Virtual University. Therefore, due to the wide variety of teaching practices, such a universal education system should be configurable and extendable. This implies that the ideal system must be made of a great number of blocks connected or connectable to each other. 

Online programs can be connected through Power Automates, which can be used to produce automates from templates or by the so-called codeless programming. The lists of services available to teachers and students are shown on pic. 3a and pic. 3b. One may notice that both lists are quite long for teachers, and also for students. Those who teach with Microsoft Teams must be aware that this program makes only less than 3% of the whole Microsoft 365 Education A3 system. For example, currently Microsoft works hard on the so-called Virtual Labs, which can be easily configured by any teacher inside the Microsoft Teams. This is not a free service even for the owners of the A3 or A5 licenses, but it is cheap since only real time consumed is charged. As a result, each such a lab costs about $1 per semester per student and since usually every student cannot take more than ten courses per semester, the real expense per each student does not exceed $10 only. The advantage of the Virtual Labs is that every student in a class gets his or her personal virtual machine running Windows 10 Enterprise. Virtual Labs can be configured by teachers or system administrators for every subject of study separately. For Mathematics or Engineering, there are ready virtual machines with MATLAB. For Computer Science, Microsoft included the most popular computer programs.

Microsoft Math

Microsoft created a mobile app called Microsoft Math. It can scan a mathematical problem on the paper or screen and responds with a step-by-step solution. A more advanced PC version was distributed in the beginning of 2021 for Microsoft Teams. It is installed in the form of a bot as well as in the form of a separate application.
In its full version, the program can solve problems in Elementary Algebra and Trigonometry, Statistics, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Elementary Number Theory. Students can enter a matrix of arbitrary size. The program gives the transpose matrix, its reduced row echelon form, its determinant if the initial matrix is square, its trace and the inverse matrix if it exists. Subtraction of the variable “x” from the entries on the main diagonal results in the evaluation of the characteristic polynomial for a given square matrix. Microsoft Math is not such an advanced program as Wolfram’s Mathematica or MATLAB. However, it is good enough to replace scientific calculators.

Insights

This is an analytic program which controls the work of every student in meetings and in the Class Notebook. The program has several sections such as the digital activity, statistics for tests, individual progress of students, etc. It is inserted as a tab in Microsoft Teams with the plus “+” sign. Azure bands on pic. 14 indicate that a student attends the meeting. The pink band shows that something goes wrong. This may envisage that the student’s video is turned off. The class grades’ distribution is shown on pic. 15. These data can be exported to Excel for statistical analysis or graphical representation in Power BI, see pic. 15.
The teacher of the class can analyze the distributions of the grades for different tasks. The latter is important for understanding possible students’ failures in tests. For instance, if the statistic of the grades for homework is poor, then the statistics of the grades for the corresponding quiz must be the same. In case of the mismatch, some measures should be taken to improve the situation. 

How to Configure Microsoft 365 for Exams?

Running online exams in Microsoft Teams is a task of a great challenge for any university. For licenses below A3 this problem is difficult to solve reliable. It is standard in this case to use a separate learning platform Moodle 3.8, which can be integrated into Microsoft Teams by mConnect developed by Skooler. This option is discussed later.
It should be observed that the price for proctoring provided by commercial companies is higher than the price for an A3 license. Moreover, if A3 licenses are paid only for teachers, the proctoring licenses are paid for each student. The method presented below saves a lot of money for any university.
As to Microsoft 365 Education A3, it includes Intune, which can be used to restrict properly access of student's devices to Azure AD. To protect the system from a non-authorizes access, the Global Administrate must enable the double authentication for every member of this system, including all teachers and students. Therefore, to study in Microsoft 365 Education any student must have a PC and a smart phone. When a student logs onto his account in Microsoft 365, he or she is prompted to enable the double authentication. During this process, students install Microsoft Authenticator to his or her smart phone. The number of the Sim card used for this is stored in Microsoft 365. From time to time, the system asks students to confirm their identity by pressing "Confirm" in the Microsoft Authenticator.
It is not at all a good idea to leave the default number 5 of allowed devices for every student. If a student has a possibility to enter his account from two PCs, then she, or he may share her, or his credentials with another person. This person enters the system from any place with conformation issued from the student's smart phone and takes the exam. To prevent this the number of enrolled devices must be restricted to two per student. The Intune Administrators create an Intune group of all students and decrease the default number from five to two, see [6].
This can be done in two steps. First, it is necessary to activate the Conditional Access, see [7]. It will make it impossible to open any product of Office 365, including Microsoft Teams, without the MFA (=Multi Factor Authentication). In turn, the MFA moves any device used under the control of the Intune. Therefore, the next step is to create the group of all students and decrease the number of devices used in the system from default five to two, see [8].
Now, any student can enter the system only with two devices simultaneously. The simplest protection measure is to demand that students install Microsoft Teams on smart phones used for the authentication. The teacher creates two meetings for the class. One is for video observation using the PC camera and another one for observation using the smart phone camera. Students fix the camera behind their desktop so that proctors can see student's faces as well as the space around them. It is also reasonable to turn on and off students microphones one by one. This prevents possible recommendations of an invisible tutor to a student. The recordings of both meetings are required as a proof in case of conflict situations. Recordings in Teams do not work. Their playbacks show only four students. One of the possible solutions is to make the screen recording in Power Point. It will record all students in the meetings' windows as well as the sounds from the rooms of students. The screen recordings with Power Point often overload notebooks. Moreover, the size of two hours of recording usually exceeds the limit of 1 Gb, which is established in Microsoft Forms. This makes it impossible automatic collection of this videos. There is another free screen recorder ShareX. It records to mp4 files of smaller size and can also record the screen unlimited. One can download this recorder form Microsoft Store, see [9]. When the exam is finished students fill in a special form, attach the recording to it and press the submit button. Then all files are placed onto the teacher’s OneDrive and can be easily accessed from the Forms interface.
Theoretically, these measures may be enough. However, it is better to identify students automatically, especially for big classes. It is also important to identify the smart phones used for the video observation. Two programs can help to do this. The first is Jibble, which was briefly described above. It must be installed on this very smart phone. Students enter the Jibble app and take selfies. They are compared with the base photo of the student. In case of any mismatch, Jibble informs the teacher by email. To apply Jibble, it must be obligatory for class attendance and must be on from the very beginning of a semester. This solves the problem of students' identification. Besides, Jibble fixes the geo location and shows it with the student's photo.
Kaizala Pro is the messenger, which should be used for communications in class. In contrast to other messengers, this one has the so-called actions. One of them is called the attendance. Students press this card and their addresses and phone numbers are automatically sent to Kaizala's site. In addition to this, in case the exam is distributed through OneNote, the teacher can see what students write in the examination papers! The suggested system is even more reliable than in the usual exam.
The final extra measure is to turn "Take a Test" on! There are two possibilities for devices of members in Azure AD - to be either registered or joint. Registered users are under the minimal control of the system, whereas devices joint to Azure AD are under much greater control and defense. A student's PC enters this state automatic, if during a clean windows installation the choice of the corporative work is made. Then this operating system will be upgraded automatically to Windows 10 Enterprise and the activation of the kiosk mode application "Take a Test" becomes available.

Document’s flows of the Administration

The document flow for department and other units can be arranged on the basis of special teams developed by Microsoft. These are the so-called PLC (Public Learning Communities) teams. Any teacher during a team creation has a choice between four options. The first is “Class” and the second is “PLC.” The difference between the two is in the types of Class Notebooks. Class teams are private so that students cannot see students from other classes. A PLC team is different since its members are teachers. Microsoft provides the Common Data Service for teachers which is now renamed to Dataverse. It is a paid service. However, the owners of the license A3 get a free access to Dataverse for teams, which can only be activated if it is a PLC team. The document flow in PLC teams can be arranged through the SharePoint using Power Automate templates. Recently, Microsoft launched Approvals. See details in [1].

REFERENCES

1. Khrushchev S.V. https://sergeykhrushchev.com.
2. Microsoft Office 365 https://www.office.com .
3. Microsoft templates for SharePoint sites https://lookbook.microsoft.com .
4. Skooler https://skooler.com/mconnect/ .
5. Examus https://examus.net .
6. Restricting the number of allowed devices in Intune https://vmlabblog.com/2020/04/enrollment-restrictions-intune/ .
7. A Conditional Access policy https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/conditional-access/howto-conditional-access-policy-all-users-mfa#create-a-conditional-access-policy
8. Set enrollment restrictions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/enrollment/enrollment-restrictions-set .
9. ShareX https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/sharex/9nblggh4z1sp?rtc=1&activetab=pivot:overviewtab .
10. PowerShell https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-core-on-windows?view=powershell-7.1 .