Student engineers develop program for online class discussions
By Brent Kampe
May 19, 2005 9:00 p.m.
Students wishing to avoid crammed office hour sessions and
having to scour Powell to find a room for their study group to meet
will soon have a convenient alternative.
A small group of students in UCLA’s chapter of the
Association for Computing Machinery are developing CourseChat, an
instant messaging service to be incorporated in the UCLA School of
Engineering and Applied Science’s course Web site system in
fall quarter 2005.
Using an open source instant messaging protocol called Jabber, a
communication tool similar to the America Online Instant Messenger
or Yahoo Messenger applications, the group is creating a system of
virtual communication for UCLA classmates.
The two engineering students spearheading the CourseChat project
are Shaun Ahmadian and Wing Chi Chan. Another student, Jason
Schroeder, who graduated last year from the School of Engineering,
also helped found the developments.
Though Schroeder is no longer at UCLA, Ahmadian and Chan say he
still has a large role in the development of CourseChat, and the
team keeps in touch daily using Jabber.
Last year, Ahmadian, Chan and Schroeder founded the Jabber team
within the Association for Computing Machinery after the School of
Engineering asked the association to incorporate instant messaging
into CourseWeb, the content management service for the School of
Engineering’s class Web sites.
“They wanted an (instant messaging) service, and we wanted
some open source material to use,” Ahmadian said.
The Jabber group then gathered five other engineering students
to work on the project, but “they weren’t making much
progress,” Ahmadian said.
In light of the difficulties the team was having making
CourseChat work between its front end and back end ““ the user
interface and the computer server ““ Chan said “some
interest was lost.”
However, during winter quarter Ahmadian and Chan took a computer
science course in which they were able to propose CourseChat as a
class project, subsequently securing ten students to help them.
“I think we had quite a bit of time constraint, because
the course was only 10 weeks long,” said Chan, adding that
the team was forced to be more creative with their work to progress
on schedule.
“Besides private chat, the idea of conference chat was a
big deal,” Ahmadian noted, mentioning that students could use
this as either a means of holding a virtual study group from their
home computers or, if a professor or teaching assistant logged on,
as a venue for virtual office hours.
A feature the group believes will be particularly useful to
students is a function the Jabber team recently completed called
whiteboard.
Using whiteboard, students will be able to draw diagrams and
equations with their computers, having their work simultaneously
displayed on the screen of another student. The two students can
work together to solve a problem and will be able to save their
work to return to later if their study session is interrupted.
Ahmadian believes this tool will be useful for many scientific
disciplines, enabling students to better visualize concepts they
discuss, such as the shape of a particular atom.
The online whiteboards were generated to easily complement the
instant messaging capabilities of CourseChat, which utilizes
Jabber.
Ahmadian said an important factor in deciding to use Jabber as
the backbone for the project is that it is open source. Open source
refers to software with source programming code that is available
to the public, allowing the students to modify the program to
include additional functionality.
“Because it was open source, there were many tools we
could use,” Ahmadian said.
Proprietary software, like most popular instant messaging
programs, are generally not open source.
To connect to the Jabber server, the team needed a client
program that was also open source. The students chose the open
source client Jbother because it is written in Java, a programming
language, and it will work on any computer that has a Java virtual
machine ““ an easily downloadable tool that allows students to
connect from several different operating systems, including Windows
and Macintosh.
In modifying the Jbother software, the Jabber team has worked to
make changes that would best suit UCLA student needs. A student
will be able to log on to CourseChat when they access CourseWeb and
see a roster of all the students in their classes ““ similar
to a buddy list. The student can then initiate private
conversations, but also discuss class material in groups. Students
can gather classmates to join virtual “conference
rooms” dedicated to their classes.
Since students must log in via CourseWeb, they cannot make false
or multiple aliases as some may do on other instant messaging
systems. They will also only be able to access rooms for classes in
which they are enrolled.
While CourseChat is being planned only for the School of
Engineering’s class Web sites that use CourseWeb, it may
eventually reach other departments on campus that currently use
different content management services such as WebCT.
Ahmadian and Chan have been meeting with the Social Sciences
Computing Supervisor Mike Franks, who believes there are social
science professors interested in the system.
Additionally, other schools may come to adopt the new
functionalities added by the Jabber team.
“Since it is open source, I think it is free to distribute
among other schools. … If other schools want to use it, that
should not be a problem,” Chan said.
The students working on the project are not being paid or
receiving a grade, since this is no longer a class project,
“The motivation is that we think that this is really
interesting and beneficial for the school,” Chan said.
