We (the core developers) are very pleased to announce the release of BigBlueButton 1.0-beta.
Our intent for this release is to increase opportunities for interaction between instructors and students. BigBlueButton 1.0-beta offers the following new features:
- Polling – Presenters can now poll students for immediate feedback. The BigBlueButton client includes a feature that can automatically suggest the proper polling choices based on the content of the slide (we call this Smart Polling).
- Improved video dock – The video dock now shows the webcams without boarders to give more visibility.
- Emoji – Students can now use emoji icons (happy, neutral, sad, confused, and away) to give feedback in addition current raise hand.
- Puffin Browser detection – BigBlueButton detects Puffin version 4.6 (or later) and enables the user to broadcast their microphone and webcam within a BigBlueButton session on a mobile device. The Puffin Browser is a mobile web browser supports the latest Flash engine over the cloud for iPad, iPhone and Android.
For details (with screen shots) see 1.0-beta overview.
Contributing organizations for this release:
- Blindside Networks — Core development, documentation, QA, and release management
- Seneca College — Client development
- Mconf — Improved video dock, auto reconnect, and webhooks
- ICES Corporation — Development and testing
- HostBBB — Testing
BigBlueButton committers for this release:
- Richard Alam – Lead architect
- Felipe Cecagno – Client
- Fred Dixon – Project manager
- Tiago Jacobs – red5
- Chad Pilkey – Client
- Calvin Walton – Record and playback
This release represents over five months of focused development effort and testing, and we’ve been running builds of 1.0-dev on our demo server for over two months now, fixing all the issues we could find before beta release.
The goal of the BigBlueButton project is to enable remote students to have a high-quality on-line learning experience. With each release we see an increase in adoption by the educational community.
“Our instructors love BigBlueButton. With our previous web-conferencing solution our users encountered many technical and usability problems that caused a lot of support effort on our part. With BigBlueButton, the support issues are almost non-existent. We are constantly impressed with the level of quality in this open source project.”
Marc Matthes, Dir. of Computer Networking Programs and Program Developer, Distance Learning Department, Iowa Central Community College
For instructions to install BigBlueButton 1.0-beta (or upgrade an existing 0.9.x server), see 1.0-beta install.
For details on the beta release process and the steps ahead before nearing release candidate, see our development process.
