Options for messaging functionality (peer-to-peer and/or student-teacher)

[Alex Little]

Hi all,

We've been considering for a while is how to provide a messaging/forum type functionality in OppiaMobile - there are quite a lot of possibilities, but the main issue is around how to cope with the online/offline aspects as many Oppia users may not be connected reliably.

One option (sent to me via email):

In regards to the messaging I'm gonna look into the Moodle messaging system.  My thought process is that 1st off whatever Moodle has now must be fairly useful cuz a zillion people are using it; 2nd the teachers already have a Moodle account and are using it to author courses; 3rd on the teachers side of things we wont have to mess around figuring out how to integrate the user interface into the Oppia server, although we could display it in the Oppia server via i-frame if practical.  What we would have to figure out is how to authenticate the login to the messaging system with both the android app and Moodle db's and of course how to display the student UI for the messaging system.

Integrating with the Moodle messaging may work. You'd probably need to create an Authentication plugin (https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Authentication_plugins) for Moodle to allow users to log in with their Oppia account

The main issue I'd see with this is that to get the messages the user would need to log in and check for new messages, rather than them being pushed to the users phones?

Other options that we've been considering are to use WhatsApp or Telegram (https://telegram.org/) - for me using Telegram is possibly the best approach, but we'd just need to figure out exactly how this could work.

Any thoughts/ideas on how to implement a messaging system within (or at least integrated with) Oppia much appreciated,

Cheers,
Alex