EdHub Week 3 Report #

MVP #

Development Process #

Last week we decided to split our project into several versions, each of which has full self-sufficient functionality. With each version new features are added to the project.

Materials: Teacher can create courses, invite students, parents, or teachers, create materials. Student can enter the course and view the list of available materials. Parent can enter the course and view the list of available materials.
Assignment: Teacher can create assignments, see the list of students’ submissions and grade them. Student can submit assignments. Parents can track their students’ submissions.
Files: Teacher can attach files up to 5MB to course materials and assignments. Student can attach files up to 5MB to their submissions.

The global plan is the following:

Project Version	Backend	Frontend
Materials	:ballot_box_with_check: Done in Week 1	:ballot_box_with_check: Done in Week 2
Assignment	:ballot_box_with_check: Done in Week 2	:white_check_mark: Done in Week 3
Files	:black_square_button: Postponed for Week 4	:black_square_button: Planned for Week 4

Our Week 3 MVP implements the Assignment version of EdHub:

user can create an account / log in
teacher can create course
teacher can invite students, parents, and teacher to course
teacher can create course materials and assignments with title and describtion
teacher can see the list of students’ submissions
student can access course materials and assignments
student can submit an assignment
parent can see the list of their children’s submissions

Demonstration Video #

To demonstrate how the EdHub MVP works, we made a brief demo video with main functionality available at the link.

Weekly achievements #

Management #

Last week we conducted a market research to explore the existing LMS solutions, and for each platform we identified the pros that we want to implement in EdHub and the cons that we want to cover. However, our view is an outsider’s view, and no one can provide us with real experience of using the platforms with students in a real educational process. We decided to launch a survey among teachers to find out what existing LMSs they use, what they like and dislike about these systems, what is important to them and what they would like to fix.

We plan to send this survey to our high school teachers as well as university professors and TAs in hopes of getting more responses through the word of mouth effect. We hope the real-world experiences of teachers will help us shape a set of features that are important in a real educational process.

Backend #

The main task of the backend team this week was to explore the possibility of attaching files to course materials, course assignments, and students’ submissions. After we have explored how to implement this, we realized that this task is more complex than we expected. To implement attachments feature, we need to think about the format for storing files, which would be better implemented in a separate database, think about the validation of files (size and type restrictions), and develop functions to send a file to the server and to retrieve a file from the server. We realized that we don’t have time to do this task in full by the end of the third week, so we started it and plan to finish until the end of the 4th week.

This week, we started reworking our database access system. Right now, in the main branch, there is a set of functions in the repo folder that provide the needed functionality. However, the code in this folder is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. For this reason we decided to implement an ORM-like set of classes for convenient INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs, SELECTs and various checks without any SQL. However, the workload is not yet finished nor ready for merging.

Previously, during account registration, users could enter any text in the email and password fields without validation. We decided to add email format check and password complexity check to protect user accounts from hacking. Password must be longer than 8 characters and contain letters, numbers and special characters.

Previously, the teacher had full rights to invite and remove users on the course. In particular with the remove_teacher command they could remove any teacher on the course, including themselves (so the teacher could leave the course). This feature was not previously available for students and parents, so we improved the remove_student and remove_parent commands to allow parents and students to remove themselves from the course if they wanted to.

We also decided to improve the syntax of the script for creating the database by adding clearer formatting, prescribing string length limits, and specifying NULLABLE objects.

We added a logging feature to the backend that logs all actions that teachers and LMS administrators may be interested in, e.g., creating or deleting a course, adding a student/parent/teacher to a course. Logs are stored in a separate database table named “logs” in the PostgreSQL database.

Frontend #

This week we reduced the Frontend tech stack. We left mainly React + pure CSS styling. The main features that we were looking to implement till the end of this week were done, such as : course creation as a pop-up, comfortable and functional sidebar, material/assignment creation, parent/teacher/student invitation, working assignment/material course feed , enhanced details of course cards and course feed, as well as material and assignment page details. Overall style and design of edhub has become more united and intuitive as well as minimalistic.

DevOps #

We have added an nginx reverse proxy for our project that allows to host both the API endpoints and the frontend server under one domain name. We put the API endpoints under the /api/ path.

Plan for the Week 4 #

During week 4, we plan to continue developing our project as follows:

the backend team plans to finalize the feature of attaching files to course objects, and to develop tests for automatic code checking (CI/CD);
the frontend team plans to fix some bugs in the current version, improve performance and develop a landing page;
the devops team plans to run EdHub on a permanent server.

Individual contribution #

Gleb Popov #

[management]: A survey on LMS use among teachers have been created and launched ( Google Forms);
[backend]: Sketches of functions for attaching files to course objects have been developed in the attachments branch;
[backend]: Validation of email format and password complexity has been developed ( PR #46);
[backend]: An option to exit the course has been added to remove_student and remove_parent functions ( PR #45);
[backend]: Careful review of pull request has been conducted ( PR #48, PR #49, PR #50);
[management]: Weekly report has been written ( PR #493).

Timur Usmanov #

[backend]: Work on ORM implementation has begun in the oop_overhaul branch;
[backend]: Database creation script has been improved ( PR #50);
[devops]: Nginx reverse proxy has been installed ( PR #48);
[backend]: Careful review of pull request has been conducted ( PR #45, PR #46, PR #49).

Askar Dinikeev #

[backend]: LMS logging has been developed ( PR #49).

Alina Suhoverkova #

[frontend]: Random styling approach has been replaced with Google’s Material-UI (MUI) React components, and styling has been switched to CSS file styling ( commit);
[frontend]: Assignments and materials pages have been added, along with pop-up modals for adding materials/assignments ( commit);
[frontend]: All assignment/material API endpoints have been connected ( commit);
[frontend]: Overall styling has been improved through the creation of reusable CSS style files for components ( commit).

Timur Struchkov #

[frontend]: Course Creation has been redesigned as a pop-up instead of a separate page ( commit);
[frontend]: Assignment and Material Creation functionality has been added ( commit);
[frontend]: Functional Assignment and Material pages with detailed views have been implemented ( commit);
[frontend]: Course Feed cards for Assignments and Materials have been redesigned ( commit);
[frontend]: Course Feed has been made functional ( commit);
[frontend]: Teacher/Student/Parent invitation components have been added ( commit);
[frontend]: Teacher Course management buttons have been hidden for non-Teacher roles ( commit);
[frontend]: Cancel/add buttons in pop-up components have been reordered for better UX ( commit).

Repository #

https://github.com/IU-Capstone-Project-2025/edhub

We confirm that the code in the main branch:

Is in working condition;
Is runnable via docker compose.