digital.learning.lab

The digital.learning.lab is a online platform and understands itself as competence centre for teaching in the digital age. School teachers will find suggestions and inspiration here for further developing their lessons, taking into account the competencies for a digitalised living and working environment.

Want to jump in?

• Bug hunt: Did you find a bug? Please check existing gitlab issues and create a new one if it is not listed yet.
• Use Cases: How would you like to use this online platform for teaching concepts and school development in your contexts? Please describe your idea as a comment to this issue
• Writing code: if you want to support the further code development, please fork the existing codebase and feel free, to reach out to us to step in
• Discuss: Do you want to see additional features or have feedback about the software? Write us at digital.learning.lab@tuhh.de

Current Main Features

• Collection of good practices of teaching concepts (Unterrichtsbausteine), software applications (Tools) and webplatforms, publications and examples of organisation development for schools (Trends) in the digital age
• Login option
  • User account
  • Development and publication of new content (Unterrichtsbausteine, Tools, Trends)
  • collaboration of users for development of joint new content
  • Review and release of contributions by authorised users

Roadmap

Short term - What we are working on now

• cluster of tools
• sequential development and submission of new content by users

Medium term - what we’re working on next!

• extended login section for school content planning
• document management for teachers

Longer term items - working on this soon!

• social community for user
• integration of media such as audio and video

Local Development Setup

🛳 Container Setup

1. Run docker-compose build to build the required images.
2. Run docker-compose up to setup project.
3. Run docker-compose run --rm dll-web python manage.py migrate
4. Create an .env file from sample.env
5. You need to have two sites configured in order to have DLL and DLT served. There is a fixture in dll/fixture/sites.json you can load with docker-compose run --rm web-dll python manage.py loaddata dll/fixtures/sites.json

📦 Database Restore

If you'd like to restore a database dump leave out step 2 of the setup. Instead copy your database dump into the database container and restore it:

docker exec [db-container-name] psql -U postgres -c "CREATE ROLE dll_admin;"
docker cp ./local_path/to/db/dump [db-container-name]:/db_dump.bin
docker exec [db-container-name] pg_restore -U postgres -d postgres /db_dump.bin

The database container name can be retrieved by runnning docker ps.

Depending on the age of your database dump there may be new database migrations which are not yet reflected in the database dump. This is usually the case when you're experiencing a ProgrammingError after restoring a database dump.

In that simply execute Django's migration command in the web container:

docker-compose run --rm dll-web python manage.py migrate

At this point all content is available but not yet indexed for the search. Setup Solr and run following command to index all contents:

docker-compose run --rm dll-web python manage.py rebuild_index

🖼 Media File Restore

If you would like to restore the media files on your local development setup simply create a directory called media within the dll directory (project_dir/dll/media/) and copy filer_public as well as filer_public_thumbnails into it.

🦸 Superuser creation

You can create a super user by running the following command:

docker-compose run --rm dll-web python manage.py createsuperuser

Please note the first and last name are mandatory fields. Leaving both fields empty may cause problems.

🐍 Python Shell Access

In some cases it is useful to be able to access the Python shell of the web container:

docker-compose run --rm dll-web python manage.py shell_plus

The shell_plus is a part of the django-extensions package. It automatically imports all project relevant models and some helper functions.

Solr 8.2

Setup

Instruct solr to use the schema.xml file:

• add <schemaFactory class="ClassicIndexSchemaFactory"/> in the solrconfig.xml
• remove the AddSchemaFieldsUpdateProcessorFactory section from solrconfig.xml (source)

Update the schema

• python manage.py build_solr_schema -f solr/conf/schema.xml

Testing

The digital.learning.lab platform comes with a testsuite, which can simply be extended and executed:

docker-compose exec web-dll coverage run --source=/code/dll/ -m pytest /code/dll/

Update Changelog

git log master.. --pretty=format:"* %s" --no-merges | cat - CHANGELOG.md > temp && mv temp CHANGELOG.md

Don't forget to fix the CHANGELOG.md afterwards, newlines might need to be adjusted as well as some commit messages might require clarification or can even be removed.

Hints for running digital.learning.lab in production

General

We're running the digital.learning.platform on Kubernetes. However a simply docker-compose setup may be sufficient for your purposes. Simply run:

docker-compose up

Make sure you follow the steps from "Container Setup" above.

Sentry

To keep track of errors you can enable Sentry. Simply add SENTRY_DSN environment variable to the running web container. If you have a specific name for your environment simply add SENTRY_ENVIRONMENT to your container's environment variables.

Example of .env file (which is used by the docker-compose setup):

SENTRY_DSN=https://34567894567890567890@yoursentry.com/42
SENTRY_ENVIRONMENT=production

Admin Access

There are two different Layers of Admin Access. The full admin interface is available by adding /admin to your installations URL. For our production deployment its available at https://digitallearninglab.de/admin.

To change the content of the site, use the CMS Interface, which is available by adding /cms to your installations URL. For our production deployments its available at https://digitallearninglab.de/cms.

Cross-Domain Login

We're using a modified version of django-shared-session to make a login across multiple domains possible. As soon as a user is logged in his or her session is validated for a given set of domains. A JavaScript snippet is generated by the server, which requests a well-known url to set the cookie for the given domains. The cookie can only be set if the user has a valid session. Since the project django-shared-session hasn't been maintained for a while we copied the relevant code to the project and updated it to work with an up-to-date version of Django. Currently 2 domains (+2 staging domains) are in use for the cross-domain-login: digitallearninglab.de digitallearningstools.de