Build great distance learning and collaborative experiences with open source technology

Due to the outbreak of Coronavirus, many schools around the world remain closed and millions of people are being restricted from leaving their homes.

Because of this, millions of students worldwide are not able to attend school or University. In view of this situation, many educational organisations worldwide are relying on remote teaching and moving lessons to online environments. Through learning platforms, conferencing tools and virtual classrooms, Universities and schools are providing online tuition so learners can continue their studies without interruption.

So, what open source tools are available to build a virtual classroom quickly?

With MoodleCloud you can build your online teaching platform in minutes and choose from a catalogue of activities, resources and collaborative tools to create engaging courses. You can also include assessments to check your learners’ progress.

Another great way of connecting with learners at a distance is video-conferencing. Included on MoodleCloud is our Certified Integration BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing solution. It provides real-time sharing of audio, video, slides, whiteboard, chat and screen. Because it’s open source, anyone can set up their own BigBlueButton server. However, if you need a big virtual classroom with thousands of users, Blindside Networks – the makers of BigBlueButton – can help you set up a scalable pool of BigBlueButton servers to support your needs. Blindside Networks has released an open source BigBlueButton load balancer, called Scalelite, that makes a pool of BigBlueButton servers appear as a single (very) scalable BigBlueButton server.

Several Universities in China, such as Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, have already deployed the Moodle + Blindside Networks solution:

“As long-term users of BigBlueButton with Moodle, when recently faced with the need to rapidly move our University’s entire learning delivery online, we immediately enlisted the help of the amazing team at Blindside Networks. Their incredible support and responsiveness meant that in just a few weeks we were able to implement a highly scalable BigBlueButton server cluster powered by Blindside Networks’ open source load balancer. This solution now delivers world-class learning to thousands of our students every day. Working with Blindside Networks has truly been a fantastic experience, and their services come with the very highest possible recommendation.”
Roland Sherwood – Manager, Educational Technologies Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Workplaces and organisations seek tools for remote work and online collaboration

Certainly, not only schools are seeing their operations affected by the Coronavirus outbreak. As thousands of companies worldwide are encouraging remote work to safeguard their employees’ health, tools like MoodleCloud and BBB combined can help shift business and operations towards digital, as well as keep remote teams connected. And, of course, our LMS designed specifically for organisational learning, Moodle Workplace, offers a great range of functionalities for online learning and communication within companies.

No matter how big or small an organisation is, or what the nature of their operations is: all can leverage the flexibility and scalability of open source. So, even if your students cannot go to class or your team is working remotely, you can still create great experiences for them.

About Blindside Networks

Blindside Networks believes every student should have access to education regardless of where they live. We build elegant solutions that enable instructors to coach, teach, and inspire students online to reach their full potential. We built the world’s most popular open-source web conferencing system: BigBlueButton.
Find more information at https://blindsidenetworks.com/scaling-bigbluebutton/