Focusing on BigBlueButton
21 January 2011 3 Comments
Earlier on today, some colleagues and I from the e-Learning team and elsewhere at the University of Bath (@alexlydiate, @vicjenkins, @jpodcaster, @edsgmj, @jezcope) met virtually to take a look at BigBlueButton. We’ve previously explored MegaMeeting, which after a two year pilot, is now being phased out.
According to the BigBlueButton website, the software “is an open source web conferencing platform which enables universities and colleges to deliver a high-quality learning experience to remote students”.
With Moodle integration now available (for versions 1.9 and 2.0), this solution was put forward as something that we might pilot as a proof of concept. The Division for Lifelong Learning are already trialling Elluminate so I’d be keen to hear how @jpodcaster thinks that the two compare.
It was a rather interesting exploratory session, particularly as after tweeting about the session at demo.bigbluebutton.org, a few fellow tweeters at other institutions (@mattlingard, @KrisEdTech, @zakmensah) joined us for the demonstration too.
It look us a little while to get going, but once we did, we managed to get a conversation started and begin to explore the functionality.
Some notes and reflections from the meeting follow:
- Once we got the webcams and headsets going, the streams were of a pretty good quality – admittedly most were on JANET-based university LANs – and the sound was variable. Adobe Flash doesn’t provide echo cancellation, so users need to have headsets ideally. @alexlydiate and I were using a webcam-based mic, so others in the conversation were getting a fair amount of feedback and echo.
- The interface reminded me of a number of ESTICT SIG meetings that I’d had with colleagues over Adobe Connect – the interface wasn’t too dissimilar, though Connect was smoother in appearance and functionality.
- @alexlydiate had a look at look at BigBlueButton over the Christmas break and found that the install guide was quite specific about the install being on Ubuntu 10.04, 32 bit. Or at least, that being the one tested and stable platform. If BUCS don’t have this expertise in house, will we (even) be able to get as far getting BigBlueButton installed on a test server?
- The Activity Monitor might prove to be useful in monitoring usage of the software. I wonder if it’ll be able to provide graphical representations of usage going forward like the ones provided for Panopto (see slide 13 in this presentation)?
- The Adobe Flash interface infers that it won’t work on mobile devices such as Apple’s popular iPhone and iPad devices. I wonder how much of a dealbreaker this would be for users, and if indeed, a HTML5 based solution is in the offing?!
- @vicjenkins commented that it took 30 minutes to get her audio working, so if we did take this solution forward with staff and/or students, a ‘Quick Start’ might well be required.
- I’m keen to learn about the funding model for BigBlueButton. For example, our institutional open source VLE, Moodle, is strategically led by the Moodle Foundation within funding contributions by Moodle Partners and other commercial activities, as well as (the community) providing support through the Moodle.org forums.
Where next? Talking to colleagues following the session, confirmed my views that BigBlueButton still has a way to go before we can consider it to be a viable solution that we can deploy institutionally. However, we’ll watch developments with interest and will consider setting up another, similar demonstration in six months time to see if the functionality has moved on at all.
Finally, I’m grateful to Fred Dixon at BigBlueButton who came along at 6.30am (Canadian Time!) to help troubleshoot our session and answer any questions that the team and I had. Thanks too to @alexlydiate for finding a spot in the diary for getting us all together.
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Thanks for the coverage on BigBlueButton and helping to spread the word. A few comments on your post:
> Adobe Flash doesn’t provide echo cancellation
That’s correct. You need to wear a headset or mute yourself; otherwise, if your using built-in speakers and microphone, other participants will hear their audio through your mic.
It’s a business decision by Adobe to not put automatic echo cancellation into BigBlueButton, but we respect that as they do a great job support Flash on Mac, Unix, and PC.
> Install being on Ubuntu 10.04, 32-bit or 64-bit
That’s the platform we support with packaging. It’s a quantity vs. quality decision; rather than try and support multiple packaging systems (which takes a lot of testing), we focused on Ubuntu and really make sure it really worked. We’ll happily update the packages for CentOS, but we’re going to need to see some support from other organizations. (We estimate it will take us about 4 weeks of development to support CentOS). See
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/issues/detail?id=624
>The Activity Monitor might prove to be useful in monitoring usage of the software.
The API hooks are all there to enable more fine-grained monitoring of the servers. See getMeetings and getMeetingInfo:
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/API#Back-office_administration_calls
> I wonder how much of a dealbreaker this would be for users, and if indeed, a HTML5 based solution is in the offing
We’ve prototyped integrating HTML5 interface into BigBlueButton. The challenge is to access the user’s webcam and microphone in HTML5, which isn’t possible at the moment.
You can envision a user able to view a recorded BigBlueButton presentation in HTML5. That we are working on now. See
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/RoadMap
> a ‘Quick Start’ might well be required.
Yes, we are looking at building a pre-flight checklist. See
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/issues/detail?id=122
> I’m keen to learn about the funding model for BigBlueButton
No VC investment (been there, done that). Funding for development is through selling products and services to help others leverage BigBlueButton (the old fashioned way). We are a core group of companies that are (very) committed to making this a successful open source project. See:
http://bigbluebutton.org/support
For more history on the project, we had a recent interview by FLOSS Weekly. Check out
http://bigbluebutton-blog.blogspot.com/2011/01/bigbluebutton-on-floss-weekly.html
Regards,… Fred
It’s difficult to do a direct comparison between BBB and Elluminate as the latter is a mature, robust, well-tested product whereas BBB is clearly not ready for prime-time . . . yet. I quite like the BBB interface, simpler than Elluminate but with enough functionality to make it a useful tool for remote conferencing. A bit disappointed with audio quality and I prefer the way Elluminate deals with audio and video settings from within the app itself rather than going through flash settings as BBB is required to do.
That said I would like to see us keep a close eye on its development and it would be great if we could persuade the powers that be to host a Ubuntu box somewhere at the university so that we could contribute to its testing and development.
We’re pretty happy with Elluminate but with its purchase by Blackboard its future, including its integration with Moodle, is obviously uncertain. Let’s hope that in a year or so we have a serious competitor from the open source world to give it a run for its money.