Back in 2022, when I was an intern at EduTec, one of our partners in the ALICE project wanted a way for students to collaborate on drawing tasks. Since our projects are essentially all about Learning Analytics (LA), of course this whiteboard would need to support the LA use case, too. So, as my internship project I built Hyperchalk.
To quote from the abstract of our demo paper that we published at ECTEL2022:
Hyperchalk is an online whiteboard to be used educational research. It provides a useful tool for collaborative assignments and supports you in collecting data for learning analytics.
In e-learning, collaborative online whiteboards have become a popular choice for implementing collaborative learning. However, existing solutions fail to deliver data in a way that allows for the application of learning analytics in this field. While the market offers several solutions, most of them cannot be integrated with existing learning management systems and do not provide data that can be used for learning analytics. To overcome this, we implement a digital collaborative whiteboard based on the open source Excalidraw and a custom back-end. The whiteboard can be self-hosted, it collects rich log data appropriate for learning analytics purposes and it integrates with learning management systems – such as Moodle – using the LTI 1.3 Advantage standard.
Since it offers a pretty solid sync mechanism for Excalidraw that works without every participant to the board being online all of the time, Hyperchalk also became pretty popular just as a general whiteboarding tools within our teams at EduTec and studiumdigitale. Hence, I updated it to make the LA data collection optional and gave it a landing page, where you can choose a board name or use a random one, similar to tools like Etherpad. So if that fits your use case, you can deploy it like this, too! Go have a look at the Hyperchalk page. It documents how to set everything up on your own server.