SOAR App – School Network Optimization Guidelines & Whitelisting

The family of SOAR Apps are distributed to hundreds of schools in the United States, and over 40 countries worldwide!  Therefore, we continuously monitor the performance of the app for all users to ensure that we are optimizing every aspect for the user that is within our control.  

However, sometimes school networks experience some difficulties interacting with the SOAR Apps.  The following are some guidelines to consider when trying to troubleshoot or enhance the performance of the app for your users.

Quick Troubleshooting Steps (Ranked by Priority)

The following list of troubleshooting suggestions are ranked in order of likelihood. 

App Source:  The SOAR App is hosted by DigitalOcean.com at the domain, https://SoarLearning.com  The IP of the main server is 159.65.42.17.  Furthermore, if your environment is having troubling even connecting with the SoarLearning.com server, we encourage you to contact Digital Ocean Support at https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/#support   We have found them to be very helpful in guiding schools on network connection settings preventing access to our servers.

Browser Guidelines:  Please encourage users to use the most recent version of Google Chrome.  The SOAR Apps are regularly optimized for performance on the most current version of Google Chrome.  Performance on other browsers cannot be guaranteed.  For instance, in some cases, the use of Safari can lead to quiz scores not being captured.

Bandwidth:  While SOAR has done everything possible to minimize the impact of bandwidth issues, it can still be a challenge for schools with many users.  There are two significant challenges with bandwidth.  The first is knowing what all the demands are of the bandwidth.  (oftentimes popular streaming sites like Youtube, Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, etc. can significantly slow overall bandwidth).  The second challenge can be the number of users trying to access at a given time.  If a teacher reports significant load time issues within a classroom, it could be because a large number of users are trying to load the SOAR Apps simultaneously.  An analysis of a school’s available bandwidth could highlight/reveal or rule-out any local constraints.

Whitelisting:  It is advised to whitelist the following domains: 

SoarLearning.com:  site of student login and app access.

Pro.ispringcloud.com:  source of SOAR content served via embed codes.

Soar.ispringcloud.com: source of SOAR content served via embed codes.

Vimeo.com:  SOAR does host additional video content from Vimeo.  

Furthermore, whitelisting the IP of the server can help as well: 159.65.42.17.

User Permissions:  It is common for teachers to have different user permissions for students.  Be sure that students and/or teachers do not have any permission filters that would prohibit writing to an external database.  This is critical as our app to record information about users’ progress and results from assessments.

Java Script:  The SOAR Apps use java script for recording quiz scores.  Some old browsers have java script turned off.  Please use Google Chrome and ensure that java script is not “turned-off.”  Also, please be sure that network settings are not disabling java script.

Whitelisting Guidelines

The following are guidelines for whitelisting domains for student access to linked content with the SOAR App.

For starters, it would be good to whitelist soarlearning.com, studyskills.com, selskills.com.  All 3 of those domains belong to SOAR Learning, Inc., so we can ensure all of the content is student appropriate.

Our LMS (hosted at soarlerning.com) serves content that we have hosted at the following domain: https://soar-learning.ispring.com/  Therefore, we recommend whitelisting this domain as well.

The following Dropbox link is a list of all embedded videos (along with their embedded links) within the app.  These videos are hosted from SOAR Learning’s Vimeo account.

SOAR Embedded Video Links: 

Video Title/Description Link
80/20 Explained https://vimeo.com/345712240
Speech Advice from Dad https://vimeo.com/345712873/5e3cf3f923
Speech Advice from Dad – Part 2 https://vimeo.com/345712240
Talk to a teacher – slide 1 https://vimeo.com/345709766/aa8fc3cdbc
Talk to a teacher – slide 2 https://vimeo.com/345709791/07da7aa599
Talk to a teacher – slide 3 https://vimeo.com/345709816/c4bc6daaaa
Talk to a teacher – slide 4 https://vimeo.com/345709831/c4d8701466
SOAR App Intro https://vimeo.com/345708811/37a53de4c2
Learning Vocabulary Words https://vimeo.com/345488466/4457a752e1
Time Management https://vimeo.com/344168551/39f99a3e19
How to Use a Planner https://vimeo.com/344167052/0591859da1
Planner Supplies Needed https://vimeo.com/344166150/da31821ff1
Difficult to Use a Planner https://vimeo.com/344164870/4d12d78e35
Observing Body Language in Communication https://vimeo.com/340297020/3328131877
Impact of a Zero https://vimeo.com/335746559/ea9c17e07e
Reading Textbooks https://vimeo.com/335745905/a5152439d6
Did You Know 2019 https://vimeo.com/335742832/105ca7754d
Assembling Your Binder https://vimeo.com/335743379/73fb28b022
Organizing Long Term https://vimeo.com/335743403/c639c6bb8f
Supplies for the Binder System https://vimeo.com/335743425/efb027bed3

Note: There may be some occasional links to outside content, such as Ted Talks, YouTube videos, etc.  However, all of those types of 3rd party links in the student app, ALSO appear in the teacher’s portal.  So, if a teacher wanted to show content from one of those links, perhaps the teacher already has broader access than the students, or else could request that specific link be whitelisted.