The main aim of this Project is to highlight, underline or remark the mistakes of the HTML: this tool is called Annotator.

Annotation demo "Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus"

Who can use this tool? This tool can be used by different profiles, students, consultants, lecturers and editors, each of them use the tool a little differently.
First of all, I will explain its main functionality, and after the differences between profiles, also called roles.
Using the Annotator tool, we can mark text in the HTML5, categorize the mark (highlight, underline or mark as errata)  and comment on it. This mark is called annotation. The categorization depends on the profile, the student can highlight and underline; the lecturer and the consultant have these previous types and one more, the “errata” type. With this type of annotation, the profile can alert the students or other consultants about a mistake in the material, for example, an orthographic mistake, a paragraph that is not well explained or similar.
The editor profile is a quite different role. The Editor cannot annotate it and can only view the errata mark and apply the correction in the material, and this lets the student see the material corrected permanently.
Another important difference between profiles is the functionality to Share an annotation. The consultant and the lecturer can share all the annotations, regardless of the type of annotation. When a lecturer shares an annotation, all profiles can see it, it doesn’t matter which classroom we are working in. Another thing is when a consultant shares an annotation, in this case the student of the classroom and the lectures of this material are the only profiles that can view it. The student cannot share at the moment, but maybe it will be possible in future versions, and this depends on the use of it.
Another important functionality is the capability to download annotations in PDF format, this can let the students study in another environment. In future development, we would like to export in other formats like word, plain text, xml, etc...
The server technology behind annotator is Nodejs. All the functionality of REST has been developed in this language and why this language? Because in the scope of the university we have a lot of materials that can be annotated, approximately 400 subjects  in each semester, each one with 3 or 4 different classrooms and each classroom with 10 students. We have 16000 students that can use annotator. This means that 1600  could use the tool at the same time. Nodejs manages a lot of connections simultaneously with a high speed. This semester has been the first time that we have an annotator in production environment ,and  it is working well.
Another functionality related to Nodejs is the capability to inform the user about  how many people are connected to the classroom at this moment, and also reading the subject materials too and an alert system to alert the student that the consultant or the lecturer has added a new annotation.
The future of our project: We have different ideas to add to this tool, for example, a categorization with personal tags, annotations with audio and video, the ability to work without connection (offline), the position analysis of the annotations, for example making a histogram that can only be viewed by the lecturer, instant alerts for the students when a shared annotation is created.

Develpment

This project has been developed using the https://github.com/okfn/annotator/wiki Anotator library, we have changed the core and created new plugins https://github.com/albertjuhe/annotator_view.

Opensource developments

Annotator viewer: https://github.com/albertjuhe/annotator_view

Annotator full aplications over nodejs: https://github.com/albertjuhe/annotator_nodejs_store

Annotations with tinymc: https://github.com/albertjuhe/richEditor

Contacte

We can adapt,install and configure this product to other platforms or environments.
Contact us: info@fados-produccions.com.

Customer

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya