CourseTracker

---

Since mid-2020, owing to the pandemic, in-person classes have been done away with, and e-learning has been at the forefront. Hence, professors and educators now share study resources and assignments with their students using various e-learning platforms, the top 3 being Google classroom, LMS, and MS Teams. Since there isn't a single common platform for a particular college, students have to keep track of all three platforms to see their assignments, deadlines, and study resources. Naturally, they are bound to miss a thing or two. Hence, we have developed a centralized platform that will scrape and display all the resources and assignments posted on LMS and Google classroom. Therefore, students don't need to browse through various e-learning platforms to keep track of their courses.

---

The project uses Selenium and BeautifulSoup for web automation and scraping. The scraped data is served to the user over a webapage using Flask.

Tech stack

• Frontend - HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap
• Backend - Flask, Selenium, Beautifulsoup

Client

Home

The Home page displays all the subjects along with the 2 latest resources and assignments (if not submitted)

Subject View

The Subject page displays resources and assignments of the selected subject

Assignment View

The Assignment page displays all the assignments (pending + turned in) across all subjects

Endpoints

GET /home: Get details for all subjects 

GET /subject/<string:id>: Get info about the specific subject

GET /assignments: Get info about all submissions (pending + turned in)

POST /assignments/<assignment:id>: Submit a file for the specific assginment (works only for LMS for now)

Future work

• Integrating MS Teams
• Add pagination in frontend
• Allow users to submit assignments for google classroom
• Scrape tesxt based announcements on Google classroom
• Building a 3 layer architecture
• Notify users when assignment is submitted
• Add logging

Requirements

All the requirements of the project are available in requirements.txt file

Running the project locally

Install the required packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the flask server (debug mode disabled):

$ python3 app.py

To use debug mode we need to deactivate the reloader for the application to work smoothly
Linux:

$ export FLASK_APP="app:app"
$ export FLASK_ENV="development"

On Windows:

$ set FLASK_APP="app:app"
$ set FLASK_ENV="development"

Running the flask server (in no reload mode - in normal mode the server is buggy):

$ flask run --no-reload

Subsequently, you will be asked to provide your login credentials (for LMS and Google classroom) and select the subjects you have enrolled in.

Then go check out 127.0.0.1:5000