Lessonspace Docs

Terms and concepts

Organisations

Organisations represent the highest level of groupings in the Lessonspace API - meaning that one Organisation can have many Spaces. Every Lessonspace account is associated with at least one Organisation (on account creation) in order to make use of the API. Each organisation serves as a single billing account.

Spaces

You will see the term "Spaces" used a lot throughout the documentation. A Space is the next level in the Lessonspace API groupings - meaning a Space can have many sessions, the same way a classroom can be used for many lessons. It's basically your online classroom where tutors and students can interact with the collaborative tools including the whiteboard, text and code editor.

All information (whiteboard drawing, images, documents etc.) in a Space is preserved because our Spaces are persistent. You can also re-use the same Space for different lessons by exporting and importing Spaces (changing classes on the fly). See Exporting & Importing for more information.

Sessions

A session is defined as the time in which one or more connections are present in a Space - basically when your lesson begins the session starts. Sessions are automatically terminated 30 seconds after the last connection has disconnected from a Space. A session will record various data points, such as the session start time, duration and participating users. Please reach out for more information on lesson statistics.

The use of the word connections as opposed to users is very important in this context. If a user joins a Space from the same browser in multiple tabs (i.e. with all the same credentials saved in their browser) it will count as multiple connections and will be billed for as such. This will be reflected in the Session object.

Idle

If a user stays in a Space with no activity for 5 minutes or more, the user will be considered idle. If all users are idle for more than 5 minutes, the session will be terminated automatically. This is to protect against users accidently leaving the Space open and causing unnecessary additional recording (and billing) of sessions that have effectively ended.

The following factors are used to reset the idle timer:

  • Tab visibility (if the browser tab is focused).
  • Any activity on any page or chat (drawing, typing, or moving the mouse).
  • Voice activity (if the user's microphone picks up someone talking).