Moodle Certified Integration BigBlueButton continues their commitment to improve virtual classrooms for Moodle users, with new and exciting improvements on every release. If you are an educator and you are not familiar with virtual classrooms, think about what you’d need from Zoom to conduct your sessions. Examples include breakout rooms, real-time interaction like polls, learning analytics and overall control of your students’ performance and progress.
BigBlueButton is free and open-source, so you can download it and run it on your own server. If you prefer to let Blindside Networks, the creators behind BigBlueButton, host your virtual classroom, they also offer a free tier of their hosting to all Moodle users. This free tier lets you have 1-hour long meetings with up to 25 participants.
Until now, to obtain this free hosting, you simply needed to click on the following checkbox from the Administration panel:
From April 22 onwards, the free hosting offer will remain exactly as it was, but the Moodle administrator will need to obtain additional credentials. Please note that this affects everyone using the free tier hosting regardless of BigBlueButton and Moodle versions.
New credentials can be obtained by via the “Blindside Networks Registration Portal” link on a page like this one:
From Moodle LMS version 4.4 onwards, administrators will be prompted to set up their credentials within Moodle. Simply log in to your Moodle site, go to “Site administration”, then “Plugins”, then “Manage activities” in the Activity modules section, and finally “BigBlueButton settings”. Visually:
Site administration > Plugins > Manage activities > BigBlueButton settings
About BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton is a Moodle Certified Integration and open-source virtual classroom software designed to help teachers teach and learners learn. BigBlueButton offers built-in pedagogical tools, such as breakout rooms, multi-user whiteboard, smart slides, visual assessment, and polling to engage students in applied learning. The integration for BigBlueButton is built into the core of Moodle, taking full advantage of the integration to give educators the ability to easily create, customise, and initiate virtual classes and manage recordings. During live classes, BigBlueButton offers a live Learning Analytics Dashboard, providing insight into which students are struggling so you can give them feedback at the moment. Because BigBlueButton gives you insights based on analytics, not webcams, you can easily pinpoint and monitor student performance.
Learn more about BigBlueButton.
