If you have a MoodleCloud site, have attended one of our Learn Moodle MOOC live sessions or have been involved with our Moodle community, you would have definitely come across BigBlueButton!
BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing tool, designed for online learning.
It is developed by our good friends from Blindside Networks, who also share our love for open source, powerful and flexible learning tools.
Fred Dixon, CEO of Blindside Networks, is joining us via online conferencing for MoodleMoot Australia 2017 in Sydney, 26 – 28 September, to give us exciting updates on what’s been happening with BigBlueButton and what’s coming up!
We spoke to Fred recently to talk all things BigBlueButton!
Moodle HQ: Thanks Fred for taking the time to talk to us. For those new to Moodle, perhaps you might be able to give us a brief description of BigBlueButton and how it works?
Fred: First and foremost, BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for online learning.
The design of BigBlueButton reflects a few goals. First, to enable instructors to effectively engage remote students for virtual office hours, small group collaboration, and full online classes. Second, to provide an easy-to-use interface that fades into the background during the lecture. Third, to provide a very deep integration with Moodle so instructors and students can easily launch into virtual classrooms and, after the lecture is finished, view the recording.
Finally, to provide all the above as an open source project so anyone in the world using Moodle could benefit from BigBlueButton.
Moodle HQ: What has been some of the best examples, stories or projects that you have seen (or are seeing) of people using BigBlueButton in Moodle?
Fred: We have many of Moodle schools using BigBlueButton. Looking at the stats on moodle.org, over 5000 Moodle sites have the BigBlueButtonBN integration installed. That’s awesome!
Marc Matthes, Dir. of Computer Networking Programs, Distance Learning Department, Iowa Central Community College, has been using Moodle + BigBlueButton for over five years.
For a recent release, Marc gave us the following quote: “Our instructors love BigBlueButton. With our previous web-conferencing solution our users encountered many technical and usability problems that caused a lot of support effort on our part. With BigBlueButton, the support issues are almost non-existent. We are constantly impressed with the level of quality in this open source project.”
The second, and more heartwarming, is the Monastic Education Development Group (MEDG), is a community based organization that supports the improvement of monastic education across Myanmar. They use BigBlueButton + Moodle to teach remote students (see https://bigbluebutton.org/2017/05/04/reaching-school-children-myanmar/).
Moodle HQ: At MoodleMoot Australia 2017, you will be giving us an update BigBlueButton. Without giving away too much, can you give us some highlights of what we can and should look out for?
Fred: You’ll find all the latest information on our blog at https://bigbluebutton.org/blog. We have a twitter account at @bigbluebutton. And if you want to join our developer community, check out our public mailing lists at https://bigbluebutton.org/support.
We always welcome feedback on our product. If you want an easy way to try out BigBlueButton, create an account on MoodleCloud. You’ll find BigBlueButton built into every site.
Thank you again Fred for taking the time to talk to us and also for supporting our MoodleMoot Australia 2017 event coming up.
You can find more information on Blindside Networks on their website.
You can also discover BigBlueButton open source project and try it today on their website!
If you want to catch Fred’s presentation at MoodleMoot Australia 2017 and be the first to get all the update on BigBlueButton, you can still register to book your spot!
