BigBlueButtonBN

The BigBlueButtonBN Activity Module allows the creation of activities into the course, and activities provide an easy way for the teacher to create and manage a virtual meeting room / classroom on the BigBlueButton server, and for the student to log into the correct room.

Features

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for distance education. The goal of the project is to enable universities, colleges, and K12 to delivery a high-quality learning experience to remote students.

BigBlueButton supports real-time sharing of slides (including whiteboard), audio, video, chat, and desktops. The latest 0.80 release can now record lectures for later playback (see release notes).

With this plugin you can

• Create links in any class to a BigBlueButton session
• Specify join open/close dates that will appear in the Moodle calendar
• Create a custom welcome messages that appears in the chat window when users join the session
• Launch BigBlueButton in its own window
• Restrict students from entering the session until a teacher joins
• Monitor the active sessions for the course and end any session (eject all users)
• Record and playback your lectures (requires BigBlueButton 0.80)
• Access and manage recorded lectures (requires recordingsbn plugin to be installed)

Requirements

You need:

• A server running Moodle 2.0+
• A BigBlueButton 0.80 (or later) server running on a separate server (not on the same server as your Moodle site)
• The lates version of BigBlueButtonBN Activity Module

Blindside Networks provides you a test BigBlueButton server for testing this plugin. To use this test server, just accept the default settings when configuring the activity module. The default settings are:

url: http://test-install.blindsidenetworks.com/bigbluebutton/
salt: 8cd8ef52e8e101574e400365b55e11a6

For information on how to setup your own BigBlueButton server see http://bigbluebutton.org/

Installation

These instructions assume your Moodle server is installed at /var/www/moodle.

• Copy zip file you downloaded to /var/www/moodle/mod

cp bigbluebuttonbn.zip /var/www/moodle/mod

• Enter the following commands

cd /var/www/moodle/mod 
sudo unzip bigbluebuttonbn.zip

This will create the directory

./bigbluebuttonbn

• Login to your moodle site as administrator

Moodle will detect the new module and prompt you to Upgrade.

• Click the 'Upgrade' button.

The activity module will install mod_bigbluebuttonbn.

• Click the 'Continue' button.

You'll be prompted to configure the activity module.

• Enter the URL and salt (security key) to your BigBlueButton server (or use the default values for testing).

• Click the 'Save Changes' button.

At this point, you can enter any course, turn editing on, and add a BigBlueButtonBN activity link to the class.

Note: You will want to install the RecordingsBN activity module to access recordings as well.

You can find a video overview of installing and using this plugin, at http://www.blindsidenetworks.com/integrations/moodle/