The owners state their vision as follows, "We believe that every student with a web browser should have access to a high-quality, on-line education. We intend to make that possible using BigBlueButton." The software they have produced, especially with version 1.1-beta, goes a long way to providing that "high-quality, on-line education." We at OABS are currently working on using BBB when we begin a new semester of training this coming August.
Some of the features available with BBB are the following:
- Student polling - If a teacher has uploaded a presentation, including slides that show a list of options, BBB will view that as a possible poll and present a button to the teacher to start a survey based on the list. If he clicks the button, buttons will appear a the bottom of each student's browser for each of the options in the list. Clicking one of those buttons registers his selection within the poll. The teacher can, at any time, dismiss the poll or publish the poll for the students to see the results.
- Multimedia presentations:
- Uploaded documents for use as slides to be presented to the students.
- Whiteboard controls work within slide presentations but offer a set of controls for annotating slides (or blank pages) on the fly.
- Desktop sharing replaces the instructor's video so students can see what the instructor is doing on his computer. The instructor must have the latest version of Java installed on his computer to share his desktop, but students need no additional software to view the results.
- Webcam support. Both students and instructors can share screen cams simultaneously, though the instructor can disable this to prevent distractions during a presentation or overloading users' bandwidths.
- WebRTC audio for high-quality, low-latency audio among users using HTML5 enabled browsers (Chrome and Firefox). Other browsers, however, will use Flash-based audio controls automatically.
- Record and playback of sessions. When used within Moodle with the BigBlueButtonBN plugin, recorded sessions automatically appear under the session join button after sessions have ended and the recordings have been processed by BBB.
- Text chat interactions between students and instructors through public and private chat channels.
Getting BBB up and running is really relatively easy. The whole process can be done within less than an hour, including the build-out of a Ubuntu 16.04 server. For the server, simply boot to a CD containing the installation media for Ubuntu Server 16.04 and build a minimal system. Don't install extra software during the build except for the default system utilities and OpenSSH if you plan to administer the server remotely. (A recommended option.)
Once the server build is complete, you will need to log on and modify your interfaces file at "/etc/network/interfaces" with appropriate values to make the server available on your network. (This is only necessary for servers with static IP addresses. If the server is a development server on a subnet with DHCP, you may not need to do this.)
The build-out instructions for BBB are available here:
The instructions are very complete and easy to follow for the technically savvy. Others might find them a little daunting, but most should be able to work out the details to get the server up and running just by carefully following the steps which are outlined.
These instructions have been updated since the last time I used them, but I was able to build out a BBB server in about 30 minutes. I'll go through the new instructions soon to see what has been added, but I don't think the changes should harm new users. If you have some problems with the build, there is a good troubleshooting section at the end of the page to help identify where things might have gone wrong.
One of the impressive things that I find with BBB is the level of detail and quality of its documentation. It has been a long time since I have seen technical documentation as complete and as valuable as the documentation provided for BBB, whether one looks at commercial or other open-source software. Fred Dixon and his team have done great work with this software.
Furthermore, their free support within their forums is excellent for a free service. The BBB team has a passion for the software and making it work for everyone. They genuinely want to know when things go wrong so it can be fixed. I've seen them interact with technically-savvy users, those who can't find the control key on their computers, and a few somewhat belligerent users. In every case, they have handled users professionally with just the proper interactions to keep discussions from blowing up and constantly help those who need help. Very unusual for free software support.
BBB doesn't include software for scheduling and managing conferences like other conferencing solutions (but see the addendum below), but it integrates well into LMS systems like Moodle. For Moodle, BBB has provided plugins to enable accessing BBB sessions from within Moodle. Once installed, an administrator or instructor can easily add BBB sessions for his classes for his students to join live or review on-demand after the sessions have ended.
In my judgment, BBB is the most accessible conferencing system to set up and use among the various open-source offerings out there now and possibly better than most commercial services, at least for DLS purposes. Educators looking to employ Internet conferencing in their offerings would do well to look into the features and capabilities of BigBlueButton.
In my judgment, BBB is the most accessible conferencing system to set up and use among the various open-source offerings out there now and possibly better than most commercial services, at least for DLS purposes. Educators looking to employ Internet conferencing in their offerings would do well to look into the features and capabilities of BigBlueButton.
Addendum
Fred Dixon reminded me of an add-on product recently been released by the BBB team. He writes, "We recently did provide a lightweight front-end called GreenLight for managing conferences (no scheduling yet) in GreenLight. See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/bigbluebutton-dev/qTEZfgp1gIs/BneJoQ5BBAAJ. We intend to build upon this framework in the coming months (and improve it based on feedback from others)."
I failed to mention GreenLight, although I knew of it and have used it. It currently provides the ability to authenticate users using OAuth technology for users with Twitter or a Google account. At this point, if you can log in with either account, you can create a meeting that includes recording capability and then control the recording during the session. Other users can join the meeting, whether they have logged in or not, but they cannot turn the recording on or off.
Eventually, for GreenLight to be viable, the concept of a role will need to be added to maintain greater control over who can log in, who can do what after they have logged in, and what-not. However, GreenLight is a good step toward making BigBlueButton a complete conferencing system.
