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Orca

ORCA is a system which allows academic institutions to gain insights about students' attendance and engagement with online platforms, most notably Moodle and Microsoft Teams. ORCA records student attendance per course as attendance lists on an institution's Sharepoint site, and overall engagement can be visualized through interactive Power BI reports.
Schools and universities can deploy ORCA on their own IT infrastructure or on the Azure cloud.

Installation

Prerequisites

  • Administrator access to a Sharepoint and Azure account
  • Administrator access to Moodle (Version 3.5 and above)
  • Powershell Core

Sharepoint and MS Teams Permissions

Since ORCA stores attendance information and reports on Sharepoint sites and records attendance from MS Teams, it needs permission to access the relevant resources. To do so, an application must be registered with Sharepoint credentials which allow it to modify the relevant Sharepoint sites.

Register a Sharepoint Application for ORCA

⚠️ If your Sharepoint tenant was created after September 2020 you must first enable Sharepoint Application Authentication for your tenant. You can do so using the Sharepoint Online Management Shell for Powershell. After installing the Sharepoint Online Module for Powershell and logging into your tenant, run the following command:

Set-SPOTenant -DisableCustomAppAuthentication $false

Navigate to a site in your tenant (e.g. https://contoso.sharepoint.com) and then call the appregnew.aspx page (e.g. https://contoso.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/appregnew.aspx). In this page click on the Generate button to generate a Client Id and Client Secret. Copy the Client Id and Client Secret and keep track of them as you will use them later. Fill the remaining fields as below:
Title: ORCA
App Domain: www.localhost.com
Redirect URI: https://www.localhost.com
⚠️ Make sure to keep track of your Sharepoint Client Id and Client Secret since you'll need them later when configuring ORCA

Give permissions to the Sharepoint Application

After registering the Sharepoint Application, go to the appinv.aspx page on the tenant administration site. You can reach this site via https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/appinv.aspx (replace contoso with your sharepoint tenant name). Once the page is loaded add your client id and look up the created principal.
In the Permission Requests XML section, add the following:

<AppPermissionRequests AllowAppOnlyPolicy="true">
      <AppPermissionRequest Scope="http://sharepoint/content/tenant" Right="FullControl"/>
</AppPermissionRequests>

Then select "Create" and choose to trust the application.

Register an Azure Application with MS Teams access for ORCA

Navigate to this URL and register a new application. When asked "Who can use this application or access this API?" choose "Accounts in any organizational directory (Any Azure AD directory - Multitenant) and personal Microsoft accounts (e.g. Skype, Xbox)".
After completing the registrations, copy the Application (client) ID and the Directory (tenant) ID and keep track of them as you will use them later.
Go to Certificates & Secrets page, create a Client Secret and copy the value as you did for the client ID and tenant ID. ⚠️ (Copy the value as soon as you create the Client Secret because you won't be able to see the value again.)
Go to the application's API Permissions page.
Click Add Permission 🠊 Microsoft Graph 🠊 Application Permissions and add the following permissions:

  1. CallRecords.Read.All
  2. OnlineMeetings.Read.All
  3. User.Read.All

After that, click the "Grant admin consent for [YOUR_ENVIRONMENT]" button.
⚠️ If the button is greyed out, a user with admin rights has to signed in and press the button instead

Deployment and Configuration

ORCA can be automatically deployed to the Azure cloud or configured to run on a custom (on-premises) windows, linux, or mac-os machine of your choosing. Powershell scripts are provided to automate configuration and deployment, although you can manually change ORCA's centralized configuration.

Deploying ORCA to Azure

Download the zipped ORCA binaries for your OS from the Releases page. Once unzipped, under the orca-{os_name}/Scripts directory (e.g.orca-win-x64/Scripts) you will find a Powershell Core script named DeployToAzureAndConfigureOrca.ps1.
The script will connect you to your Azure account and automatically provision/configure the required resources to run Orca. Make sure to have the Azure CLI installed before running the script.
Once run (with Powershell Core) the script will ask you to fill in the required settings to deploy ORCA, such as the Sharepoint Client Id and Client Secret that you generated in earlier steps.
If you decided to add a database during the configuration process to benefit from Power BI dashboards, keep in mind that firewall rules by default block access to the database from outside the Azure cloud. You can safely ignore connection errors you get when opening the generated Power BI template (.pbit) file. Once you publish the template to Power BI Online, you should be able to access the database.

⚠️ The script sets sensible defaults for the resources to deploy such as the size and price of the web server running ORCA and the optional database. You can change these advanced settings in the ARM template used under orca-{os_name}/Scripts/AzureResourceManager/template.json's parameters section.

Deploying ORCA to a server of your choosing

Download the zipped ORCA binaries for your OS from the Releases page. Once unzipped, under the orca-{os_name}/Scripts directory (e.g.orca-win-x64/Scripts) you will find a Powershell Core script named ConfigureOrcaAppSettings.ps1.
Once run (with Powershell Core) the script will ask you to fill in the required settings to configure the orca-{os_name}/appsettings.json file, such as the Sharepoint Client Id and Client Secret that you generated in earlier steps.
After configuring the application, you can run it through the executable under orca-{os_name}/Orca.exe. For a more robust setup consider running ORCA behind a reverse proxy (e.g. Nginx).

Post Deployment configuration for MS Teams access

After deploying ORCA, you have to add the public host URL(or the domain of the web app you setup on Azure) of ORCA to the app you registered on Azure that has MS Teams access. To do that, go to Azure Active Directory 🠊 App Registrations 🠊 [YOUR_APP] 🠊 Authentication and add the URL to the Redirect URIs.

Post Deployment configuration for Moodle

After deploying ORCA, you must configure your Moodle server to notify ORCA whenever students interact with content on Moodle. To do so you must install the ORCA Caliper Plugin for Moodle. After downloading the orca_caliper_moodle_plugin.zip, you can install it from your Moodle server's plugin page (found at MOODLE_SERVER_NAME.COM/admin/tool/installaddon/index.php).
At the end of the installation process, you will have to set the following settings as specified by the Azure or On-Prem deployment scripts which you ran earlier to deploy ORCA:
'Event Store URL', 'API key', 'Batch size'
After configuring the above settings, go to the Logging category under the plugins administration page (found at MOODLE_SERVER_NAME.COM/admin/category.php?category=logging) and enable 'Caliper log store'.

Choosing which courses to monitor

After deploying and configuring ORCA, you can choose which courses on Moodle you would like to monitor engagement and attendance for. To do so, you must go to the Sharepoint site which you configured ORCA to connect to and open the Sharepoint List named "CourseCatalog".
Add the Moodle course Short Names under "CourseId" and the name you want to give the attendance sheet under "SharepointListName". ORCA will automatically create an attendance list under the Sharepoint site for every entry. Optionally you can set the Microsoft Teams JoinWebUrl (if they have one) under "JoinWebUrl" to record attendance via Microsoft teams.

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