Peer instruction: update 1

I always avoided JavaScript. With my long exposure to Python, JS never appealed to me. And yet my whole Google Summer of Code project consists mainly of JS.

Let me quickly reintroduce basic ideas and plans for Peer Instruction project.

Peer instruction concepts

The most important feature of Peer Instruction is the ability to, from the technical point of view, quickly switch between teacher and student modes.

Teacher’s mode

Teacher mode is basicly a broadcast sent to every student in a classroom. This might be quite challenging: you can have many direct connections and suffer from capped bandwidth and high CPU usage.

Teacher broadcasts their stream to multiple students. (click to enlarge)

The solution is to introduce additional server that helps to “spread” the stream to multiple students. It essentially looks like this:

Teacher broadcasts their stream to multiple students through Multipoint Control Unit. (click to enlarge)

What’s really good about this design? There’s an excellent open-source MCU available: Licode. I must admit Licode is a little too complicated to set up, but authors’ support and continuous development make it a great option if someone wants, for example, to host their own alternative to Google Hangouts or Skype.

Me testing teacher’s mode. (click to enlarge)

As you can see above, the interface is pretty simple, but it works (at least for 1 student). I have yet to test it for more students, but I haven’t received a server account at Mozilla to do so.

Student’s mode

This is the second mode of broadcasting. A very crucial from the point of science of peer instruction.

In this mode students are split into smaller groups so that they can talk with each other.

Right now I’m thinking how to implement this mode. One of the ideas is to create one Erizo Room for every group of students.

The way events are propagated within Erizo makes it really easy to subscribe to other students’ streams within one particular room. Using multiple rooms also helps manage all these smaller groups.

I should also mention that Erizo can create “full MCU” rooms - ie. rooms where streams are going through the server - and Peer-to-Peer rooms, where the server only handles sessions, signalling and events, but the streams are actually transferred between the room participants.

I think for small groups of 2-4 students it’s a good idea to use P2P rooms and save resources on the server.

Unfortunately, this solution has some drawbacks, too. I found out that Erizo can only handle so much rooms at once (it’s specified in configuration, but I don’t know the retionale behind it).

Current issues

My main focus for next week(s) is working PoC of students mode. Right now I’m working on a protocol used by Licode events.

It’s possible to send data through Erizo streams. I want to use this “channel” to communicate with students’ browsers.

For now I’ll only send data like “join room ABC for small group discussion” and “leave room ABC”. In future Peer Instruction might be more advanced - quite important feature is chat, and I will likely leverage the existing protocol for that.

Anyway, that’s the update status on my project. I highly welcome any contribution or comments.

Here’s project GIT repository: https://github.com/pbanaszkiewicz/peer-instruction