Moonami: Announces Blindside Networks/BigBlueButton Partnership
DATE: Wednesday, February 19th, 2020
TIME: 1:00 pm EDT
DETAILS: Do you deliver virtual classes at your school or company?
BigBlueButton is the leading virtual classroom for Moodle. According to moodle.org, the BigBlueButtonBN plugin ranks as the 6th overall most popular plugin (over 27,000 downloads) for Moodle in the last 12 months.
Like Moodle, BigBlueButton is an open source project with a large community of users world-wide. Blindside Networks, the company that started the BigBlueButton project, provides premium hosting of BigBlueButton for virtual classes. Moonami is an official reseller of premium hosting.
How does BigBlueButton work? BigBlueButton helps instructors deliver effective online classes in three areas: integration, engagement, and analytics.:
- For integration, the BigBlueButtonBN plugin supports Moodle calendar integration, mapping of roles, pre-uploading of slides, and display and management of recording. Recently, at the MoodleMoot Global 2019 in Barcelona, the Blindside Networks team demonstrated the upcoming support for Moodle’s activity completion. With activity completion, Moodle will be able to mark the user as having completed the activity when they have, for example, participated in online classes for a total of 120 minutes.
- For engagement, BigBlueButton supports real-time sharing of audio, video, screens, slides, emojis, and chat with students — all the core features you would expect from any web conferencing system. BigBlueButton extends these core features to include multi-user whiteboard, shared notes, polling, and breakout rooms.
- For example, in a virtual office hour, the instructor can use a multi-user whiteboard to work together with a student on solving a hard problem. For an online class, an instructor can place students into breakout rooms, have them collaborate together for 15 minutes, and then bring them back into the main session to present their results. Similar to walking around tables in a physical classroom, the instructor can join any breakout room in progress to coach and assist.
- For analytics, instructors can see the recording of the session along with a detailed report of each student’s attendance in a session and a detailed breakdown of their participation, including talk time, total chat/emoji/raise hand, and response to all polling questions. This analytical data is also downloadable as a CSV file for use within Excel.
- It’s easy for instructors and students to join a BigBlueButton session. It offers a pure HTML5 client; there is no binary to download and no plugin to install. Users simply click the BigBlueButtonBN activity link in Moodle and it loads with the browser (FireFox and Chrome are recommended for desktop users). Similarly, there is no app to install for mobile devices. BigBlueButton runs nicely within Safari Mobile on iOS 12.2+ and Google Chrome on Android 6.0+.
If you’re interested in trying out BigBlueButton, please contact us at Moonami and we can set up a free version of BigBlueButton within your Moonami site.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Moodle and BigBlueButton can help you teach effective online classes, please join our upcoming webinar.
To register for this event, please complete the form below. You will get a confirmation message
Big Blue Button-Moonami Webinar 2/19
Wednesday 2/19/2020 at 1:00 pm ETPosted in Ed Tech, Moodle, Moodle Integrations / Plugins, Webinar
Tagged Big Blue Button edtech, elearning, lms hosting, Moodle, moonami, webinar