Making an Online Whiteboard Ready for Multimodal Interaction: Integrating Textand Voice Chat into Hyperchalk

Hyperchalk is an open-source online whiteboard aimed at use cases in education and has been developed with Learning Analytics in mind. It allows users to sketch and draw in a collaborative environment. Similar to commercial whiteboard tools, this allows the implementation of various collaborative learning tasks. However, unlike commercial solutions, in the background, the tool collects trace data, which can be used to study learners' collaboration processes and calculate metrics that inform teachers about their learners' collaboration processes. Collaboration, however, always involves communication between collaborators, and analyzing it is crucial for understanding emerging learning processes. So far, this was a dead spot of Hyperchalk as the tool was limited to collecting only what happened on the whiteboard itself. In this paper, we present an updated version of the tool, which allows users to communicate directly within Hyperchalk with the help of text and voice chat functionalities that have been added. In particular, we illustrate the technical architecture that is a basis for these added features.