We probably all know Moodle, but how many of us have heard of Big Blue Button?
Big Blue Button is a purpose built open source on-line learning tool designed from the ground up to be an interactive classroom/video conferencing tool.
It has many of the features you might find in Adobe Connect whilst being relatively light weight.
Apart from it having the ability to be easily integrated into a Moodle course, it also has an exceptionally easy recording feature which automatically saves the recordings back to Moodle whilst at the same time providing the course administrator with statistics of who was present, who “really” took part and how long for.
Currently Big Blue Button can be accessed on the HT Moodle platform, which is linked to the BBB demonstration servers. We also have an experimental version on a server. This version is based on the very latest B code which effectively replaces Flash with HTML5.
We hope to have this version ready by the start of the new semester, but should you wish to try out this version, please let me know and I’ll give you access.
Feel free to try out Big Blue Button, and if you wish to join in any group trials, please let me know and we can see what it is possible to organise.
There are a host of resources on the Big Blue Button website, and also a complete set of instructions here – Carlton University, Canada. The developers of BBB.