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Mozilla WebFWD Graduation Video

BigBlueButton news No Comments

On September 19th, the BigBlueButton project officially graduated from WebFWD, an open source accelerator program from Mozilla.

During our participation in WebFWD, Mozilla helped us raise the visibility of the BigBlueButton project and provided us access to Mozilla’s technical, user interface, marketing, and product development resources.  In particular, we greatly benefited from the mentoring provided by Diane Bisgeier and Pascal Finette, two of the WebFWD principals.  

During the program, we visited the Mozilla offices in Mountain View three times, and during the last visit, which was the graduation, the video gurus at Mozilla interviewed Fred Dixon, the project manager the BigBlueButton project, and created this WebFWD graduation video for BigBlueButton for us to share.

Nice video — thanks Mozilla! 

 

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BigBlueButton HTML5 Client Video #2

BigBlueButton Team HTML5 No Comments

We’ve made more progress on implementing the BigBlueButton open source web conferencing platform as an HTML5 client since our first post two weeks ago.

We’ve just uploaded video #2 that demonstrates the BigBlueButton HTML5 client synchronizing its slides with other clients (click on the image below to watch the video).

What’s next?  We’re now working on implementing more whiteboard events (circles and text) and streaming audio to the client.  This work is part of our entry for the Mozilla Ignite Challenge: High Quality Open Source Web Conferencing System.

This HTML5 prototype is still work in progress and not ready yet for others to build and test (we’re working on it!).

 

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Simplifying The BigBlueButton UI

BigBlueButton Team User Interface No Comments

With the BigBlueButton open source web conferencing platform growing, we are always looking to push open source web conferencing tools further.  We also want to constantly improve the overall user experience.

Hence, as with every release, we’re always asking ourselves “How can we make BigBlueButton simpler?”

In the current release, an obvious area for simplification is the separated Users and Listeners window.

 

Why two windows?  In the early days of BigBlueButton, users needed to call into the voice conference through the phone system (BigBlueButton didn’t have built in VoIP like it does today).  The separate Users and Listeners windows make it easy for the moderator to see who was on-line and who had called in.

Nowadays, with the built-in VoIP, based on our observations, over ninety five percent of the BigBlueButton sessions use the built-in VoIP.  Hence, having two separate windows the moderator sees two lists of users with the same names.

Furthermore, the two window design presents usability problems when a user raises their hand (in the User’s window) and the moderator needs to mute them in the Listeners window.  When there are many users in a session (such as twenty five), it may take a moment for the moderator to locate the user.

To simplify BigBlueButton interface, we’ve decided to combine the Users and Listeners window into a single window: Participants. See the screen shot below for the moderator’s view of this window.

This screenshot shows everyone’s status on the far left (presenter, moderator, or raising their hand). On the far right, it shows what media sources each user is sharing (audio or webcam).

At the top of the screenshot, above the Participant’s window, you can see the familiar icons for sharing the desktop, webcam, and microphone.  We’ve redesign them so they match their counterparts in the Participant’s window.

The two buttons at the bottom of the Participant’s window provide the moderator general controls, such as enabling the moderator to switch the presenter role to another user.

 
 
 
 
 

Switching to how the window looks for a viewer, see the screen shot below.

For the viewer, the Participants window allows them to see the names, statuses and inputs of their colleagues (just as for the Moderator).   However, they have only buttons at the bottom: one to raise a hand, and another to mute/unmute their microphone.

The unification of the Users and Listener window will result in a more simplified experience for the viewers and moderator.  We believe that anytime we can simplify the user experience in a BigBlueButton release, we are headed in the right direction.

We’ve not implemented the design yet, and we’re still tweaking them. If you want to give feedback, please feel to comment below or post on this thread in the bigbluebutton-dev mailing list if you are already a member of the list.

 
 
 
 

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BigBlueButton is used at Simon Bolivar University

BigBlueButton Team Community, Universities 2 Comments

It is always a good new to learn that a University or College around the world adds to the number of institutions using BigBlueButton for their regular classes.

The Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela recently offered its teachers through a Technology Update Workshop, training in the use of BigBlueButton as the real time collaboration tool that is going to be part of the educational technology platform to use in their programs.

In a 1 hour and 5 minutes video (in Spanish) Arcadio Torres, Chief of Services at the University, gives an overview of BigBlueButton and presents practical use cases based on the Chamilo LMS integration.

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