watrall/lena-backend repository overview

⁠Backend Image: watrall/lena-backend

GitHub repo: https://github.com/watrall/lena⁠

LENA (Learner Engagement and Needs Assistant) is a lightweight AI chatbot pilot designed to support students in online courses. It helps learners get quick, accurate answers about assignments, schedules, and university policies, reducing instructor burden in high-enrollment classes and helping students stay on track.

LENA isn’t meant to replace instructors. It handles common questions and points students toward course resources, then routes low-confidence questions into an instructor review workflow. Every question and interaction is logged, creating a feedback loop that helps instructors spot confusion early, adjust materials, and improve the course.

Students interact through a simple chat interface that works on desktop and mobile. Instructors and course admins can view real-time insights in an analytics dashboard, tracking trends, top questions, and emerging pain points across multiple courses. The pilot version is fully containerized (FastAPI backend + Next.js frontend + Qdrant vector store) and integrates with GitHub Actions for automated testing and builds.

⁠About This Image

This backend service, built with FastAPI, handles course-scoped Q&A, ingestion, and pilot analytics. It provides endpoints for chat, feedback, escalations, insights, exports, and instructor tools (demo-only auth).

Frontend image: https://hub.docker.com/r/watrall/lena-web⁠

⁠How to Run

docker pull watrall/lena-backend:latest
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 watrall/lena-backend:latest

Once running, the API is available at http://localhost:8000⁠.

⁠Key Features

• Fast, asynchronous FastAPI backend
• Course-scoped Q&A (course_id enforced) with citations
• Ingestion pipeline for course materials and uploaded resources
• Feedback + review queue + escalation logging for pilot operations
• Instructor dashboards and exports (demo-only auth)
• Rate limiting and feature flags around higher-risk endpoints

⁠Demo Authentication (pilot-only)

This backend includes demo-only instructor authentication for instructor tools. It is not production authentication. For real deployments, integrate institutional auth/SSO and proper role-based authorization, and apply standard perimeter controls.