Deft response

The Deft response block allows teachers to interact in real time with students directly in a Moodle using Texts, Choices , Comments, and provides Venues for them to speak with each other with context sensitive audio conferencing using WebRTC peer-to-peer. Video can also be streamed to participants using a media server. Demos are available at https://deftly.us. It can also provide updated course information to course formats like Popups course format.

How it works

Deft provides a service which allows real time changes to the Moodle site to be communicated to clients. Whenever something happens in the Deft response block, all clients that are currently displaying the block receive a notification that something has changed, and the content of the block is updated by the browser. User data or actual content is only transferred from the Moodle site to the user.

The external service is available to enable updating the contents in users' browsers via  websocket or other messaging protocol. There are two options to provide this updating either a self hosted Jitsi server or a service provided by deftly.us. The service is linked as an External Tool (LTI), but user information is not shared with the service other than what is necessary to provide connection i.e IP number associated with block's context. The service can also provide bridged audio and video hosting.

Requirements

Licensing and usage

The plugin is GPL. The service will remain free for smaller sites, but sites with larger usage may eventually require a service agreement.