BigBlueButton:
Your Online Teaching Advantage Now Fully Integrated into Moodle

Learning management systems (LMSs) have become an integral part of contemporary education; they are essential for educators, learners, managers, and administrators. Moodle HQ, maker of the World’s most popular LMS, has launched Moodle 4.0 with built-in integration for BigBlueButton.

Moodle 4.0 is here!

Moodle 4.0 is a massive update that focuses on simplifying the life of teachers and students.

A common question for students is “what are the important activities I need to accomplish today?” Moodle now answers this question directly by aggregating pending tasks from a student’s activities and summarizing them in a streamlined user experience. The overall navigation in Moodle is focused on helping students manage their time and getting tasks done more quickly.

For teachers, Moodle 4.0 makes it easier to set up a course, structure it, and reorganize it in a drag-and-drop manner that is consistent with modern web applications. There are many improvements to the user experience and functionality, and a key improvement is the integration of BigBlueButton into its core.

Prime Integration

The BigBlueButton plugin had already received the status of Premium Moodle Integration. The BigBlueButton plugin was first released in 2013 by Blindside Networks, the company that started the BigBlueButton project. Over the years, Blindside developers steadily updated it to take advantage of each new release of Moodle, often earning multiple “early bird awards” as shown below.

“When we first released the BigBlueButton plugin for Moodle, we wanted to provide teachers a teacher-centric virtual classroom that fully integrated with all of the capabilities of Moodle. Our goal was to make BigBlueButton feel like a natural extension of Moodle. Today, we are so proud to be further supporting teachers and students around the world with the integration moving into the core of Moodle.”

Fred Dixon, CEO of Blindside Networks

BigBlueButton and Moodle are open source, and both projects saw tremendous growth in the past two years. When the pandemic hit in 2020, teaching online in virtual classrooms became a critical part of almost every school. According to statistics at moodle.org, the BigBlueButton plugin reached the #2 spot for most downloaded plugin (#1 was a theme), out of a pool of 1,400 plugins. Moodle.org recorded over 20,000 registered Moodle sites running the plugin.

Both products share a similar ethos in development and mission as well.

"There's a camaraderie amongst people who believe in and support open source development. BigBlueButton stood out as the most capable virtual classroom solution in the space."

Martin Dougiamas, Founder and CEO of Moodle

Integration Benefits For Students and Teachers

With the release of Moodle 4.0, Moodlers will experience the following benefits:

Ease of use — The BigBlueButton integration now leverages the updated user interface of Moodle 4.0, reducing overall support and training costs. Users can join a virtual class with a single click (no external login required).

Personalize your virtual classroom in advance — Teachers can save time by customizing their BigBlueButton within Moodle. The customizations include specifying a default presentation, setting default for lock settings, and preventing students from joining BigBlueButton until the teacher has started the class.

Engagement for learning — BigBlueButton is designed to enable teachers to engage students for learning with features that include multi-user whiteboard, shared notes, public/private chat, polling and breakout rooms. The sessions can be recorded and the recordings can easily be managed by the teachers within Moodle itself (with no external application required).

Live analytics for teachers — To give insight into students’ performance, BigBlueButton provides teachers a live dashboard, called the Learning Analytics Dashboard, that answers three questions: who is attending (and for how long), who is participating (with a relative activity score), and who is learning (based on responses to polls)? The dashboard helps the teacher see, at a glance, who is struggling or excelling in their online class.

The Foundation For Innovation

Perhaps the most important outcome of the integration is that it lays the foundation for even deeper synergies between Moodle and BigBlueButton. The developers of the BigBlueButton plugin are working closely with Moodle HQ to extend and enhance those synergies, based on feedback from teachers, for teachers and students.

For example, an experimental feature (enabled under Site Settings) is integrating the data from BigBlueButton’s Learning Analytics Dashboard with Moodle’s activity completion. A teacher can specify, for example, for Moodle to automatically mark a BigBlueButton activity as completed for a student when they have attended an online class for 90 minutes.

Free Tier Hosting From Blindside networks

To ensure that every teacher using Moodle 4.0 can setup, configure, teach, and assess student performance using BigBlueButton, Blindside Networks is offering free hosting of BigBlueButton to Moodle 4.0 sites with the following limitations: class sizes up to 25 users, viewers see only moderator’s webcam, maximum of 60 minutes per session, and recordings expire after 7 days.

Any school can easily set up their own BigBlueButton server (see i nstall), or, if they want commercial support, reach out to any of the companies that provide hosting for BigBlueButton at https://bigbluebutton.org/commercial-support/.

A Discussion Between Two Leaders

Interview

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