Graciously hosted by the University of Vienna, over 20 core developers from countries such as Brazil, Canada, Germany, and Austria converged to advance the BigBlueButton project.
BigBlueButton began in 2007 at Carleton University in Canada with an ambitious goal: to build the world’s most effective virtual classroom measured in learning outcomes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, BigBlueButton’s usage exploded across the world. It became a core part of national and institutional infrastructure, including widespread use by German universities, the French government, and resulted in deep integrations with the world’s two most widely used learning management systems: Canvas and Moodle.
BigBlueButton is now the default virtual classroom for a significant portion of the world’s educational ecosystem.
Since those early days, BigBlueButton has continued to evolve. Its core capabilities now rival those of proprietary video-conferencing platforms, expanding adoption beyond education into corporate and government environments. With the release of BigBlueButton 3.0, a new plug-in architecture transforms BigBlueButton from a product to a platform (which we build upon during this developer summit).
BigBlueButton Developer Summit #22
We focused on three themes for this conference: Improving Learning, Improving Collaboration, and Improving the Core. Whether you’re interested in pedagogy, infrastructure optimization, or plugin development, there’s a session for you.
Theme: Improving Collaboration
As BigBlueButton’s use expands outside the classroom, we want to improve the capabilities for facilitating collaboration. Fewer mouse clicks, more time collaborating.
- Smart Layout: Ramón Souza explored having BigBlueButton automatically update the layout for students when the teacher shows/hides the presentation area.
- Reducing time to try BigBlueButton: Ahmad Faraht explored modifying GreenLight to allow users to join without logging in, paired with a Google Calendar plugin for scheduling.
- Persistent Sessions: Daniel Schreiber prototyped enabling the shared notes to persist across sessions.
- Multiple Screen sharing: Tainan Felipe explored enabling multiple students to share their screen, including giving the moderator the ability to “peek” at the screen shares without shifting their focus on the presentation.
Theme: Improving the Core
As BigBlueButton becomes more of a platform, we want the core to be solid.
- Optimizing communication: Gustavo Trott did a deep dive into investigating some slowness of the client and how it relates to HTTP1/1.1 and HTTP/2.0 settings on the BigBlueButton server.
- Reducing memory footprint: Tiago Jacobs rebuilt Hasura from source to better instrument it and investigate why it was holding onto memory under particular circumstances.
- Audio Improvements: Klaus Scheuermann, an audio engineer, worked on creating a web-assembly component that builds upon a WASM module from the popular RNNoise project. The result was some great improvements for background noise removal and auto leveling.
- Arm support: Timo Nogueira Brockmeyer and Samuel Weirich took on the challenge of getting a dockerized version of BigBlueButton running on an ARM-based Mac. They succeeded, leading to a very satisfying moment where they showed a live demo at the end of their presentation.
It was another successful summit! Many of us were impressed with how far we were able to progress in a week of intense effort. We learned a lot, advanced the project, and had some really good meals together.
We invite you to watch any presentations from the 22nd BigBlueButton Developer Summit which will shape BigBlueButton’s next release.
View the full playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uofPdF73k8w&list=PLeSl48Y1rgh8szSJOUcAhOetpNYQZdwHx
Commercial Support
BigBlueButton remains fully open source and is the default virtual classroom for Moodle and Canvas.
BigBlueButton is a platform you can install locally with commercial support. This option makes it especially compelling for organizations that prioritize data privacy, regulatory compliance, and digital sovereignty.
If you’re looking for SaaS hosting of BigBlueButton and commercial support, check out the companies at: https://bigbluebutton.org/hosting/
