DISCLAIMER: This is not an official Google product.

Virtual Tutors App

The Virtual Tutors App is a simple, experimental web application to enable multiple tutors to serve multiple students remotely using a customer service ticket model. In operation, a student creates a help request, and each logged in tutor sees the help request appear in a queue. Any tutor can then respond to a pending help request, which causes a video connection to be automagically established (using WebRTC) between the student and the tutor.

The app also includes rudimentary admin features to enable provisioning students, teachers, and classes.

This is still very much an experiment and a work in progress, and not intended for use in production. Please feel free to provide comments or suggestions if you find issues.

Current Features

• Establish WebRTC connection between a student and a teacher using a Firebase real-time database for signaling
• Provision teachers and students in Firebase database
• Create classes in Firebase database
• Google Sign-in Authentication (via Firebase)

Installation

To install, you need to do the following:

• Install npm, bower, and firebase-tools. See [https://firebase.google.com/docs/cli/]
• Provision your own TURN/STUN server. COTURN is a good option and fairly easy to setup. See [https://github.com/coturn/coturn/wiki/CoturnConfig]
• Edit public/src/vt-conference.html to point to your own TURN/STUN server.
• Setup a Firebase project with a realtime database. See [https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/start]
• Edit public/src/vt-app.html to point to your Firebase database
• Pull the necessary dependencies - bower install
• Optional - copy the security rules from database.json into Firebase. See [https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/security/] If you don't do this, the default rules will apply, which require users to be authenticated but provide no other restrictions. The rules in database.json were compiled using firebase-bolt from the database.bolt file. See [https://github.com/firebase/bolt]
• Run the application locally - firebase serve - or host it on Firebase firebase deploy

How It Works

The underlying technologies for Virtual Tutors are:

• WebRTC
• Firebase realtime database
• Polymer

Limitations, Known Issues, and Caveats

• Currently this has only been tested with modern Chrome and Firefox browsers. Other browsers may work too . . . or not
• When adding new users and classes, there is a known problem with the UI that requires reloading the page
• Currently only single peer-to-peer connections are supported
• Others

License

The code is released under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for more details.

This project is not an official Google project. It is not supported by Google and Google specifically disclaims all warranties as to its quality, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose.