The pace of development in BigBlueButton is accelerating.
Today, BigBlueButton has
- 150+ developers who have contributed 5 or more merged pull requests, and
- are localized into over 65 languages, and
- Major learning management systems, including Moodle, Instructure (Canvas), PowerSchool (Schoology), and Jenzabar (eLearning) have embedded it into their core products. Together, these integrations cover more than 75% of the world’s learning management systems for K-12 and higher education.
The project recently completed two BigBlueButton Developer Summits, Dev20 in Berlin, Germany (Dec 2024) and Dev21 in Porto Alegre, Brazil (April, 2025), bringing together the global BigBlueButton community to accelerate development.
Below are the four key themes from the past two developer summits that give insight into our path towards building the world’s most effective virtual classroom.
1. Transformation from Product to Platform
“The addition of plugins moves BigBlueButton from a product to a platform, and when you think of a platform, you want a solid foundation that is modular and extensible.”
– Fred Dixon, Keynote for Dev20
A central and foundational theme is the significant shift of the BigBlueButton project from primarily a virtual classroom product to a more versatile and extensible platform.
The latest version of BigBlueButton 3.0, released on February 28, 2025, now includes a plugin architecture designed to lower the barriers for developers, companies, and the global community to extend BigBlueButton’s functionality without modifying the core (see new plugin SDK).
For example, BigBlueButton 2.7 had built-in transcription based on the live captions. In 3.0, this is now a plugin that enables the project to quickly and easily provide the expected functionality (such as downloads) of a live transcription.
2. Significant Under-the-Hood Overhaul for Performance and Scalability
“You can see the number of users increasing to 700” – Daniel Schrieber, Stress Testing BigBlueButton
We made some big investments in the core of BigBlueButton. The first was rewriting the client-server integration and replacing older components (MongoDB and Meteor) with Hasura and Postgress (using GraphQL) for improved scalability. The second was improving the audio and video quality, especially for lower bandwidth connections, by moving away from FreeSWITCH and MediaSoup towards LiveKit.
3. Redesign of the User Experience (UI/UX)
“A lot of the updates that we’ve done so far have been through the findings that we received from the user experience studies” – Júlia Rathke and Tyler Copeland, New UI Improvements and Refinements
A multi-year effort continues to completely redesign the BigBlueButton interface, informed by extensive research and user testing. This aims for a more modern, intuitive, and consistent user experience. The results of this will be visible in BigBlueButton 3.1, which had its first beta in April 2025.
You may see us make a big splash about the upcoming release of 3.1 later this year with the tagline “Welcome to the post-Covid19 BigBlueButton.”
4. Deep Commitment to Active Learning and Pedagogical Tools
“So now if the teacher wants to make any corrections, they can just put a check mark [next to the student’s whiteboard] and it becomes a two-way collaboration between the teacher and that student.” – Kert Browne, Whiteboard Vision
The project remains fundamentally focused on promoting active learning and feedback to increase learning outcomes, distinguishing it from passive video conferencing tools (passive learning has very poor learning outcomes compared to active learning).
BigBlueButton offers built-in tools for active learning (like whiteboards, polling, breakout rooms) and live analytics (via the Learning Analytics Dashboard) to ensure every student learns.
One project within BigBlueButton we continue to advance towards is “Whiteboard Vision,” the ability for the educator to give each learner their own whiteboard, along with a birds-eye view to see who may be struggling and give them feedback when it matters most: in the moment.
Playlists for Dev20 and Dev21
To check out more videos from the summits, here are the playlists for both summits.
21st BigBlueButton Developer Summit (14 videos)
20th BigBlueButton Developer Summit (6 videos)
