Agora Tutorial丨How to build an education platform independently in 15mins?

[Foreword]

2020 is a very special year for the world. The "physical connection" between people has been severely affected, and most of the daily life and work have gradually shifted to the online. Affected by this, a large number of offline businesses have also accelerated online transformation. Among them, the online trend of the education industry is particularly obvious.

For educational institutions, there are currently two main options for building common teaching platforms: a directly-used SaaS platform and a self-developed PaaS platform. But these two methods have more obvious strengths and weaknesses: SaaS is ready to use but cannot be flexibly extended; PaaS can be customized according to business needs and can be expanded later, but there will be certain requirements for the developer's experience and development time.

In this process, how to effectively obtain own user data to promote user retention and how to quickly build a self-owned brand is the current challenge for online education. The emergence of the educational aPaaS platform may just be able to meet the above needs.

What is education aPaaS

1. About aPaaS

Before we understand what education aPaaS is, we first need to understand a few basic concepts about cloud services. Take the following figure as an example, let’s simply point it out:

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) is the right to manage all functions on the operating system. Just like an unprocessed ingredient, you can choose the utensils yourself, and then use this ingredient to make any cooking. There is a lot of room for use, but it requires a lot of resources to purchase, time and labor costs.
• PaaS (Platform as a service) abstracts away hardware and operating system details and can be scaled seamlessly. Developers only need to pay attention to their own business logic, not the bottom layer. What you get is a semi-finished food. On this established basis, you can adjust the taste or ingredients according to your own needs. The saltiness is up to you.
• SaaS (Software as a Service) provides users with the ability to use cloud service provider applications running on cloud infrastructure. Approximately it can be eaten directly, but there is almost no way to make more adjustments and choices.

Image Source:

https://twitter.com/jeffbarr/status/892767314168365056

It is not difficult to see that the PaaS platform provides developers with the greatest flexibility, from business logic to real-time interaction methods, and even the definition of audio and video parameters, which can be customized. However, since there are more open interfaces, developers need a certain amount of time to implement them according to product requirements. Although SaaS can be "taken and used", the shortcomings are also obvious: inflexible, unable to be customized, and business data stored on third-party platforms.

So what is aPaaS?

Both aPaaS (Application Platform as a Service) and PaaS can complete software development and deployment, and both support cloud access. For developers, the difference between the two lies in the integration time and the amount of code. Take the development of a relatively complete educational application as an example. Developers using PaaS need at least two weeks to one month. In addition to the functions of hundreds of APIs, they also need to understand the code at the business logic level. In aPaaS, complex business logic is encapsulated into configurable parameters. Developers don't need to worry about the underlying logic or learn what each API is. Just configure the ready-made parameters to what they need. It only takes 15 minutes to use education aPaaS products at the fastest, and the application can be launched by modifying several rows of parameters.

2. What does education aPaaS bring to us?

Self-owned brands and personalized business functions are innate needs of educational institutions. As the business of educational institutions continues to grow, this demand will become stronger and more urgent. At the same time, data such as teacher and student information and course logs are also a very important part of corporate assets for the future business growth of enterprises for educational institutions, and it is also vital for the retention of students.

If you choose to use a SaaS platform, you can use it directly, but because it is developed based on industry standardization needs, it is difficult to meet the customization needs of institutions, even in the logo, UI, domain name and other brand information of educational institutions. Exposure will also be very limited, which is not conducive to the creation of independent brands of educational institutions.

On the other hand, business data such as teacher and student information and class data will also be passively retained on the third-party live broadcast platform. For enterprises, this is undoubtedly a hidden danger for their own data security.

Although developing on the PaaS platform can avoid the above problems well, and even do a better job in customization, it is also a bit difficult for an inexperienced development team or a project with a tight schedule.

The "Smart Classroom" released by Agora is the first educational aPaaS product based on Low-code. It helps educational institutions and developers to launch their own brands in as fast as 15 minutes, which fundamentally speeds up the local or cloud The time required to build and deploy powerful modern educational applications. Supports own brand, flexible and expandable functions, independent control of business data, stability and reliability, and XLA experience quality assurance.

• Low-code development, modular function expansion-improve efficiency

"Smart Classroom" is based on the Agora Education aPaaS platform of Shengwang. It also meets the needs of users with flexible customization and low-code access, saving 90%+ development time, and launching its own brand's full-featured online interactive teaching platform in 15 minutes. With rich functions such as classroom interaction, classroom management, role management, authority management, user management, etc., it supports flexible expansion of business functions through modular function design. At the same time, it realizes the whole process of online teaching and supports seamless connection with the user business management system through standard interfaces.

• 10 times load redundancy, no longer worry about high concurrency-stability

Relying on the self-developed software-defined real-time network SD-RTN™ developed by Agora, it is based on deep learning algorithms to identify network abnormalities in real time and accurately, to achieve a "zero perception" failover mechanism for users, and to escort high business availability. It also aims at Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North America and other countries where foreign teachers are located, as well as domestic small and medium-sized cities, to achieve exclusive network optimization, and the end-to-end high-quality transmission rate is higher than 99%.

• Data is safer in your own hands-safe

After the "Smart Classroom" is launched, the business data of educational institutions can be stored locally or on a designated third-party server, and institutions can achieve 100% independent control of data retention and migration. At the same time, it also provides functions such as resource isolation, content encryption, transmission encryption, and identity authentication. Multiple security protection measures guarantee the security of the business data of educational institutions.

Cloud Classroom in 15 Minutes

Development ≠ writing code. For developers, it is your ability to write the same requirement in 100 ways, but writing the requirement in the most efficient and concise way is a choice.

For developers, the focus of educating aPaaS platform is not only to improve efficiency and reduce costs. More importantly, some technical people may not be able to write 100 kinds of codes, but they care about business and have 100 kinds of business ideas, but in the end they all Constrained by the technical threshold. With the mature infrastructure, ready-made standard parts, and automated assembly lines in education aPaaS, developers only need to focus on the core business value. Even if you encounter non-standard requirements, you can do it yourself at any time and use the most flexible manual customization method to solve various corner problems.

Soundnet has been committed to reducing the burden on developers and lowering the threshold through low-code methods, making the development of real-time interactive scenes more universal and more convenient. As the first low-code education aPaaS product in the education industry launched by Soundnet, "Smart Classroom" modularly encapsulates the complex logic that originally required hundreds of API interfaces to develop "online interactive classroom", simplifying it to just fill in or modify a few. A simple parameter can be completed online, educational institutions and developers no longer need to spend a lot of time to understand the complex logic of the underlying audio and video.

Take the Web as an example, first prepare:

• Create an Agora project and obtain App ID and App certificate
• Get Netless AppIdentifier and sdkToken
• Third-party cloud storage account
• Generate RTM Token (for details, please refer to the RTM Token generation document: https://docs.agora.io/cn/Real-time-Messaging/token_server_rtm?platform=All%20Platforms )

Then obtain the Agora Edu SDK through npm/cdn, and modify the AppID, userUuid, dom node, and RESTful API token in the code according to the comments.

The following example demonstrates the creation of a 1V1 classroom

 1 AgoraEduSDK.config({
 2  // 声网APP ID
 3  appId: '<YOUR AGORA APPID>',
 4 })
 5
 6 AgoraEduSDK.launch(
 7  // 放置教育应用的dom节点
 8  document.querySelector("#root1"),
 9  {
10    // 你的用户的全局唯一标识ID，需要与你签发restToken时使用的uid一致
11    userUuid: "userUuid",
12    // 声网RESTful API token，必须使用RTM Token
13    rtmToken: "006f488493d1886435f963dfb3d95984fd4IABFUDvP51uuFjh3OT3Z3AhgOvCxoWDJ959XnVqGGFbJE0AK77EAAAAAIgCUerYEzZcCYAQAAQD/////AgD/////AwD/////BAD/////"
14    rtmUid: "12311"
15    // 用于显示的用户名
16    userName: "userName",
17    // 你的课堂的全局唯一标识ID
18    roomUuid: "roomUuid",
19    // 进入房间的角色，roleType 1: 老师, 2: 学生
20    roleType: 1,
21    // 房间的类型，0: 1v1, 1: 小班, 2: 大班
22    roomType: 0,
23    // 用于显示的房间名
24    roomName: "roomName",
25    // 是否开启设备检测，true的话会在进入教室前显示设备检测页面
26    pretest: true,
27    listener: (evt) => {
28       console.log("evt", evt)
29    }
30  }
31).then(e => window.room$ = e)

According to the needs, modify the class name, user role, class type (such as 1v1 class, small class, large class), room name, etc. to complete the basic development.

Note: The "Smart Classroom" of Soundnet mainly provides real-time interactive experience in the classroom, and does not provide user systems and lesson scheduling systems.

If you have established your own user system and lesson scheduling system, you can refer to the figure below to connect your user system and lesson scheduling system with the "Smart Classroom" of Soundnet.

You need to implement the following business logic:

• Deploy the RTM Token generator on your server, and generate RTM Token through Agora App ID, App certificate and user ID parameters. For details, please refer to generate RTM Token document.
• Design a RESTful API to achieve the following three purposes:
• • verifies whether the user logging in to the App exists in the user system.
  • obtains the user's personal information and schedule information.
  • Obtain the RTM Token issued by the RTM Token generator for the user.

client obtains the user ID, class ID, and RTM Token, it calls the launch method of the Agora Edu SDK and passes in the user ID, class ID, RTM Token, and other parameters to start the "Smart Classroom" on the sound network.

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