====== Course Player Tutoring (In progress) ======

===== Desired Features =====

1. Whiteboard (Tutor only can draw / students can draw too )

2. Document/presentations

3. Audio conferencing

4. Tutor video conferencing 

5. Share desktop.

6. Chat

App should be light weight and be played in course player.

===== Options being evaluated =====

=== 1. Bigbluebutton ===

== Positives ==

a) Has all the desired features.

b) Integration is easy and known architecture.

c) Under active development including HTML5 client for a near future release.

== Drawbacks ==

a) Not scalable/lightweight (known issue, can be worked on).

b) Whiteboard is not that lightweight and only presenter can draw as of now. Types of whiteboard sketches are limited. We can add more shapes if needed.


== Improvements Needed ==

a) Bigbluebutton client needs to be fixed to launch in the course player(may be through iframe).

b) UI needs to be redesigned/customized to only show presentation panel. Mic, user list, will be shown as icons in the top menu and clicking on that we can open inline popups to show details. We can turn off undesired features like chat/video conferencing/deskshare.

c) Whiteboard can be improve in the future.
 
== Conclusion ==

We can use bigbluebutton as the first option as the UI can be customized to only show presentation panel. Also, there will be a HTML5 client in the upcoming releases and record and playback can be used from 0.90 release which is the next to come.


=== 2. HTML/JS based lightweight whiteboard ===

== Positives ==

Lightwieght and mobile compatible.

== Negatives ==

Could not find a complete/feature rich open source tool yet. Many are just prototypes but not prod ready.

== Conclusion ==

Matisse (https://github.com/Imaginea/matisse) is one full featured open-source whiteboard sharing tool. This is nodejs based and has no voice conference/desk-share features. We need to implement voice conferencing for other features for this.
Other js based whiteboards are a bit limited in terms of either document types they support or whiteboard toolbar options.

=== 3. 3rd Party Whiteboards through APIs ===

== Positives ==

Already developed and being used for tutoring. Only integration is needed.
== Negatives ==

Need to pay for the integration. Hence, these are not the best option anyway.

There are some 3rd party white board tools which can be integrated inside our course player through their APIs. This is not the option we are going to take as we need to  buy them. But just mentioning them here.

https://www.scribblar.com/ - Seems to be based on Bigbluebutton but not sure. Has a rich whiteboard tool options.

http://www.twiddla.com/ - Seems to be based on openmeetings. Has etherpad integration also.

=== 4. Open Sankore ===

This is a very feature rich shared whiteboard software with all most any document, audio, webpage or desktop can be used as a shared whiteboard content. But this is totally an install based software. Also, could not find voice conferencing feature in it which is a big drawback. We can't use this anyway. We can take some inspiration from this towards our UI/features.


===== To be Explored =====

https://github.com/Hironate/PeerChat

https://github.com/johnmclear/draw

Apache open meetings