Collabosphere

Collabosphere is a collection of Instructure Canvas Basic LTI tools, allowing for innovative functionality to be added to any course site:

Asset Library

The Asset Library is a place where students and instructors can collect relevant materials for the course. The materials can be seen by the other students in the class and can be discussed, liked, disliked, etc.

Whiteboarding Tool

The Whiteboarding Tool allows for students to collaboratively work on whiteboards. Whiteboards can be used to remix assets from the Asset Library, create mindmaps, provide feedback, etc.

Engagement Index

The Engagement Index provides a leaderboard based on the student's activity in the course. The Engagement Index will record activities such as discussion posts, likes, comments, etc.

Development Environment

Note: this documentation is currently limited to OS X.

PostgresSQL

Collabosphere uses PostgresSQL as its database. In order to set up PostgresSQL and the required database and database users, the following steps should be taken:

# Install postgres
brew install postgresql

# Start postgres
postgres -D /usr/local/var/postgres

# Create a database and user
psql template1
  template1=# CREATE USER collabosphere WITH PASSWORD 'collabosphere';
    CREATE ROLE
  template1=# CREATE DATABASE collabosphere;
    CREATE DATABASE
  template1=# CREATE DATABASE collabospheretest;
    CREATE DATABASE
  template1=# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE collabosphere TO collabosphere;
    GRANT
  template1=# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE collabospheretest TO collabosphere;
    GRANT

Collabosphere

In order to install and start the Collabosphere app server, the following steps should be taken:

# Clone the Collabosphere codebase
git clone git://github.com/ets-berkeley-edu/collabosphere.git

Dependencies

Packages

Ensure you have the following packages installed and available in your $PATH:

• Node.JS and NPM

• Cairo and all its dependencies. On RHEL systems the following packages have to be installed:

  • cairo
  • cairo-devel
  • cairomm-devel
  • libjpeg-turbo-devel
  • pango
  • pango-devel
  • pangomm
  • pangomm-devel
  • giflib-devel

  Check out the node-canvas installation wiki for more information.

## Node modules

Depending on your X11 installation you might have to explicitly set the PKG_CONFIG environment variable

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig
npm install

Run Collabosphere

node app

Canvas synchronization

By default, Collabosphere will poll the Canvas API for any new activities that are included in the engagement index. Whether polling should be enabled and how often it should run can be configured in the canvasPoller section of the configuration file.

You will need to configure a Canvas API key for a user, preferably a global Canvas administrator, that is able to list the:

• users
• assignments and all their submissions
• discussion

Production build

The production build will:

• Concatenate and revision all vendor files (angular, bootstrap, etc..)
• Concatenate and revision all application javascript files
• Concatenate and revision all CSS files
• Concatenate and revision all HTML fragments
• Optimize and revision images
• Replace all references to any changed assets in the index.html file.

A build can be generated by running gulp build.