 Hello everyone. Welcome in today's webinar is entitled Effective Virtual Classrooms Using Big Boo Barton. I am Anna Krasav from Moodle HQ Education Advisor and with me today is Fred Dixon from the Big Boo Barton Incorporation. Fred, over to you. Thank you, Anna. So as I say here, I'm actually, I wear two hats. So I am the product manager for Big Boo Barton, which is the open source web conferencing system that we've been building since 2007. And I like the joke that I'm also also moonlight as the CEO of Blindside Networks. And we're the company that manages a lot of the releases of Big Boo Barton and provides hosting around the world for many people using Moodle. So to just make a distinction between the two sort of terms, Big Boo Barton, again, is an open source project. We like to say it's built by teachers for teachers or for teachers by teachers. And that reflects that we've been focusing on education for the entirety of the project. That's the one market we focus on. It was designed to empower teachers to effectively engage remote students for learning. And in terms of the company Blindside Networks, so we are incorporated 2008, and we provide hosting and we do it for all around the world. But if I were to say that the pandemic was an interesting time for us, that would be an understatement. But we're very deeply embedded into Moodle. And we actually became part of Moodle Core in the Moodle 4.0 release. Okay, so let me tell you a little bit more about Big Boo Barton. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little bit of a narrative in terms of like before I get to any features. I'm going to tell you if how we came down to the design of Big Boo Barton and how we grounded that design in what we'll call like applied theory. Basically looking at the components of a successful virtual class, the structure of a virtual class, and some of the elements of learning theory that factor into how you can deliver and how you should deliver an effective learning effective virtual class online. And these basically reflect that this is the market we focus on. So when we talk about Big Boo Barton, we don't talk about it as a video conferencing system. We talk about it in terms of we are building the next generation of virtual classrooms. That's our mission. We believe that the value of having a teacher feel like the world is their classroom and that the current crop of software does not well suit what the needs of the teacher and student are in a virtual classroom environment. And this may resonate for you from you. If anybody here is in the session that taught during the pandemic and in doing so they grabbed a video conferencing system. You can pick the usual suspects and said okay now it's time to teach my class online using this video conferencing system. You might have found that it didn't really provide you the framework or the tools that you needed to deliver the class online. You may have found yourself using third party tools to try to cobble together something that allowed you to engage your students monitor their progress and give them feedback. So we are not building a video conferencing system. Now I would say video is an important part of virtual classrooms but not a sufficient part. There are many other components of the video virtual classroom that are important and this is what I'll go through in the next few slides and how that weaves into how we think about and build Big Boo button for you as a teacher. The value of education online cannot be understated if you look at UNESCO sustainability development goals there are 17 education quality education is one of them. And in terms of supporting the other goals, having access to quality education is fundamentally a critical component of achieving many of the other ones. Think of a teacher teaching a rural school, local, state, government, world, all of the teachers, many of the kids around the world did not have the opportunity to walk down the street and go to a class. I was fortunate based on where I'm living in Canada, but if we can raise the ability for students and teachers to connect with each other in a way that helps them deliver effective virtual classrooms, then we can raise everyone in the world. And that is what our kind of, not our mission but our, our goal is the why of what we do it we want to transform lives by improving education for everyone. Yes, the entire world, that is our mission. And today Big Boo button is localized in the 55 languages, thanks to our open source community, I only speak one. But thanks to the global community is a global open source project we are now 55 languages and growing. So how do we achieve that mission well it's by creating Big Boo button, which is an open source virtual classroom build by teachers for teachers, and by that means the design of Big Boo button is guided by what the goals of teachers and students are. So I'm going to now segue into what is it that we do what how do we look at a virtual classroom in a way that helps us focus on the needs of the teachers and students. So, if you read a book called drawing the right side of the brain, which I'll reference in a few minutes. And actually let me ask you this. Has anybody read a book, the book called drawing on the right side of the brain. And I'll just do start a poll true or false. Okay, I see there's one person who has seen it two people are read it. That book was very influential for me three people have read it. Okay, so I'll talk about it a moment Betty Edwards fantastic book she basically looks at how to draw the point of view of brain research and breaking down drawing into fundamental components. And that she argues that if you master those components, you can draw. And if you draw on your right side of the brain you can draw very effectively. When we looked at a virtual classroom and spoke with many teachers and students, we basically broke it down into four components. Successful virtual class as an aspect for management relationship engagement and assessment. And we would argue if you do those for well that you will have an effective virtual class. So we looked at that and we phrase it in the terms of a teacher in terms of a user story what is the job the teacher is trying to do. And so what guides us are these four kind of user stories. So here I want to set up and manage my classroom for success. Let me do everything I can ahead of time so that when I'm in my class, I'm able to engage students and I'm not spending much time management. The platform understands that I'm trying to teach and helps me teach relationship as a teacher I want to establish presence and trust within between my students. So think of it, there's no back at the classroom in the blue button, you have visibility to everybody. But this actually hits to the goal that you need students to apply themselves. You need them to be engaged, and you need them to feel comfortable doing it with you and with each other maybe in breakout rooms. So a successful virtual class or an effective one has this relationship that the students feel comfortable applying themselves and that means you have to establish that. And they're certainly you can do that in the physical classroom you just do it a little differently in the virtual classroom but that's an important component of having an effective class. Engagement is the key. As a teacher I want to effectively engage and activate their minds for learning. That's not engaging them to hold their attention, but to actually get them to apply themselves struggle and, and in doing so, the fourth one kicks in where you can see who's struggling, assess their progress and give them timely feedback. So these are four components of what we believe is an effective virtual classroom from the point of view the teacher. From the point of view of the student. It's a little easier the student isn't really responsible for management of the class. That's the teacher. What the student wants to do is feel comfortable to participate, both with the teacher and with their peers. They ultimately want to efficiently master new skills. And that's their goal. Think of this in terms of a difference between want and need. They may want to not participate in the virtual class. They may want to just watch the recording at 1.5 times speed. Maybe they're looking at tick tock at the same time. That's what they may want to do. But what they really need to do is be in the class, applying themselves, making mistakes and learning. And ultimately they want to receive help when they're struggling. In other words, is the teacher aware of them cares of them and able to give them feedback. And that's the no back of the classroom. They should, if they can get that experience, then they feel like the virtual class has value and it's value for them to put their effort into participating. So these seven user stories are what guide us in terms of the development of the glue button. But there's other, there's two other components. So learning theory, and this is where I'll segue into the drawing around the right side of the brain. For those of you that read it, the three people, fantastic book, five components of successful drawing, I just went through the four we believe for a virtual classroom, and then she looked at brain theory. So for us, these are the four that I just mentioned. It's a way for us to break down the problem into four areas and just make sure we excel in each one of those areas. And then for us, in terms of brain theory just at a high level, and this is what's dealt with in the course, but I'll go through it at a high level. The brain works like a muscle. We have short term and long term memory. And we have what I'll just call for purpose of this webinar, stage one stage to stage one is like automatic thinking if I asked you what two plus two is you just come back. Higher order thinking is if I said what's 179 plus 237 you'd have to think about that for a moment. The key thing is a brain works like a muscle it's not a computer. If it was a computer. We could all watch four hours of basic Spanish on YouTube, and just walk out the street and start talking to basic Spanish. That's just fundamentally not how our brain works. It's like a muscle, it has to be stressed, has to recover stress recover, and through that we create new neural pathways, and then we build up our knowledge. When we do build up knowledge is built in hierarchies. If you are building on an uncertain foundation, then you have troubles putting new knowledge on top of that. And at some point you just, if it's all caught up. It's the switch keys that the knowledge is not supporting what you're trying to learn so it's very difficult to learn something new. Basically as a teacher you want to make sure the foundation you're building on is solid. We learn most effectively with and from others that goes back to if you want to learn something. If we could just sit down and read the book, and we were masters of it that would be great. Again, that's just not how our brain works. We learn from teachers and we learn from each other. That actually is the foundation of what Moodle has created social constructivism that we learn by teaching others. We learn from others, and we learn by watching others teach and learn by modeling behavior, and you can think of that later on and breakout rooms and big button. The one here is we learn in stages and I'll quote one there's different taxonomies blooms taxonomy is very well known, and it basically shows that our learning goes through stages. We have to remember something before we can understand it. Once we understand something we can apply it. I'll use the example that Wikipedia is. I can remember what an apple is. I can understand the difference between a Macintosh apple and the golden delicious. I can take an apple recipe and bake it. I can pull it out of the oven, and I can look at it and then I can start to evaluate does it look like it big correctly does it taste big correctly and so on. Finally, I can create my own recipe based on understanding and that of all these previous. So, if you stare at that hierarchy and it's stage right everything builds in the previous stage and our brain is basically at one of these stages, and the goal the teacher is to move the students from stage to stage to ideally to get to mastery to be able to create. If you stare at that diagram long enough, you'll realize it's kind of three groups of activities. And the first group remember and understand is really just memorization. It goes back from the short term to the long term. I noticed someone just raised their hand. If I can ask if you have a question or comment as I as I as I talk, just type it in the chat. Because I'm sort of using bloom as a way for applying and I'm sure there's other ways of looking at it. If you stare at long enough, the first parts are really just memorization, I can memorize the difference between Macintosh and a golden delicious, and I would have gotten to this level of mastery. If I look at the next section, this is really applying. And this is where we'll call like the stage two or the higher order thinking gets in. So I'm going to now struggle with baking a recipe. And in doing so I'm going to start to learn things about how I can use example apples, apples work how they combine together and what the results are. I'm going to become opinionated of it. But this is me applying I'm actually learning at this point. And if I can get to the last part where I actually take the learning that I've got, and plus some creativity. Now I start to reach mastery. So, what this shows us is sort of like the real learning occurs here. And this memorization, maybe not the most effective use of the virtual class. But this part here is the most effective use that's the that's the playing field that you want to be in, when you're teaching students online. So I did put a slide in here with social pedagogy or social constructivism that is, and I won't go through the details but this is pulled right from noodle. This is the five tenants that Martin Digi MS came up with, when he was designing noodle. Okay. So, all of that theory basically comes down to our argument that the most effective virtual class is one that spends the most time getting students applying what they have remembered and understood. And it's giving them feedback, like a coach or like a tutor to guide them to make sure that they're understanding the concepts correctly applying them correctly and getting feedback so they can move through those stages of learning. So, the virtual classroom should maximize the time for applied learning that's actually engaging and feedback from the teacher. So, how do you do that well there's another way of thinking of a virtual class not only from the four foundations and how the learning theory fits into it like our brain is like a muscle. We don't really rewire things until we start applying ourselves making mistakes and so on. You can think of the structure as having sort of certain beats. If you think of a 60 minute virtual class it's not just a homogenous 60 minutes of activity. What we think about is that there's four kind of sections that if you look at the foundations of a successful virtual classroom. You can structure it according to this and this is just kind of copying what happens probably a normal every class. There is a social part at the beginning, which is important for forming those relationships. So, some time with the virtual class should be given over to social, if only to just, you know, tell ask people like, you know what their goals are the class something about themselves like open up a bit so everybody feels comfortable working with each other. And I'm almost implied here that I'm not talking about a class with one person, and I'm not talking about a class with 200 people, the kind of talking about the average size class which may or may not be the same for people in the world but let's say it's 10 to 25 students. You know, a reasonable amount of class that you can kind of interact with people sometime during the class you'll get a chance to interact with some of them, or all of them. So in the social part building the relationship. There's the introductory part which really has two parts is to quickly review what was previously covered. That is the foundations are solid. And if you do that and find that one of the concepts that was in the past class isn't as solid as you like it. Maybe you take five 10 minutes and just shore that up so that the rest of the material which builds on that foundation is is on a bit on a more solid foundation. And then the let the second part of the introduction is just look ahead in terms of what it is you're going to be going through the class. There's the main segment and the summary. I'll talk about the main segment moment and the summary is really to summarize what was done, but according to brain theory, it's actually best to ask the class, what do you think the main points were covered. And that forces them to recall and to think about. And again, more effort more stage two thinking more reflection more higher order. You want students doing the brain work and the teacher as a teacher guiding them through and making sure the foundations are solid. You correct things when you see them errors and you give them feedback and assess. And of course this summary would follow would become the material to review on the next class so they kind of feed into each other. So for the main segment, going back to what the theory suggests the most effective time is applied learning and assessment. So, ideally you can structure the class where you teach some component. And then you spend as much time as possible, getting the students to apply it and assessing their progress. And I will show later on a little bit how big we button can help do that. You've heard probably terms of this called micro learning, you try to chunk things up into smaller chunks. The goal is talking for 60 minutes may encourage students to just watch your recording at 1.5 times speed, building in times where you get them to engage like I've been kind of doing a bit here with the polling makes them feel like the classroom is live and engaging and the teacher is aware of them and cares about them. Over time, you would probably want to build up more and more engagement so let's say this is the first class, this leads into the second class leads into the third class. The rhythm gets to be more time engaging, and the content is again chunk up in the smaller parts. This is just conceptual, but the, but the argument here is that the more time for engagement, the more effective the learning. In terms of like the before and after there are things that go on before your class starts and afterwards. So I did an example here where let's imagine some moodle. It's the first class you have a syllabus, and you want to take a few moments and record, let's say a five minute introductory for the class. So that's the concept of classroom, but it's really grounded in learning theory, where if I can learn some things ahead of time before the class, it frees up the teacher to focus more on the higher order like the stage two type thinking, which is the applied learning. If all students came in the class knowing what apples were and what the difference was between McIntosh and Golden Delicious, you could probably spend more time on terms of what the recipes are and less time explain the differences between McIntosh and Golden Delicious. And this is really the remembering understanding part. At the end of the class, you have key takeaways. And of course, in big blue button through be a class recording. You can play to the advantage of a virtual class. I don't talk about it too much detail in the course. But the virtual classroom gives you advantages over the physical class. One is that everyone is online. They have access to a computer. So if you give them a recording ahead of time, by definition, if they're going to be able to participate in your virtual class, they will be able to watch the recording. During the class, you have the ability to flip back and forth activities very quickly, even perhaps more quickly than in a real class. And those activities that you do are generating data for you. It's getting whether it's in the recording or data that has lied during the session. So this kind of diagram tries to show like there's a rhythm, the tea takeaways become the review material from the next class, there's more engagement as time goes on, and you continue. Okay, all of that now leads into how can you use big blue button to deliver effective virtual classroom, knowing what the structure of a virtual class and would look like, a bit of how our brain would work and how engagement is so important. And what would be the four foundations of a successful virtual class. So what we're going to do is we're going to just break down how big the button applies to those four foundations. The first one was management, which is really set up and manage your class for success. In Moodle, the integration with big blue button is deep. It is built in now to the core of Moodle. At the height of the pandemic, I think it was a number two most downloaded plugin across like 1400 plugins. As such, with my developer hat on, and the team have worked on integration we have tried to make sure we make use of every ability that will provides our offers to a plugin. We have tried a rich set of ways to configure things ahead of time. In terms of the ones that will probably be the most useful. You can set up a lock settings so that in this class, for example, in this online webinar we have locked every student so that you can't share your webcam. So we just deem that it's, instead of us having to do this manually at the beginning we just set it up. So it's locked. Currently you can upload one slide deck but I know in Moodle 4.1 the team is working on being able to let you upload two or three slide decks ahead of time, so that when you start your class your slides are all there. They'll take a moment to convert and they'll appear. You can map user roles. So any roles to find in Moodle can be mapped into roles in big blue button. Big blue button has two roles, which is a moderator and a viewer. Moderator stands for the person who has the ability to moderate the session, make someone present her, give them all the rights to present her, mute other students, lock other students and so on. The viewer is kind of the participant role, the student, they're able to come in, share webcam, share microphone, type in the chat, respond to polls, but they can't affect anybody else. They're only sort of, they're only doing their own activities. And there's also ability to prevent other users for joining. So you can set up the class in Moodle where either it's in the calendar, whether it's visible, or whether you actually just tell the Moodle plugin for big blue button, do not let anybody join the class until you as a teacher start the class. So people will just get a spinning dial and they'll say the class has not yet started. The next is relationships. So relationships is important for establishing the learning. And here video is an important component. We do video. This is a screenshot from one of our internal calls their 60 webcam shared we're all talking with each other. The content isn't important as this point as just seeing each other and hearing each other. And there are things that you can do in big blue button such as we always highlight the current talker at the top. So it's very easy for you to see who's talking. You can pin a webcam as well. So if there is a students want to pin a particular webcam like yours or make yours bigger, they can do it. And there's other activities which are talked about in the course in terms of like icebreaker type activities. So during that social part you may say look, I'm going to put you into random breakout rooms. And here's a question to answer. Like what place in the world would you love to travel to, you know, or what book influence you the most. There's just some examples that you probably already do in your class, but just making some time for that in the virtual class is important to establish those relationships, which then later on feed into engagement. In terms of engagement, this is where you want to engage them, not so much for like, yes, hold their attention, but get them to learn and big blue button provides a number of ways to do that. Raise hand public private chat of which we're using emojis multi user whiteboard which I'll show because we're in big blue button I'll do a live example of it pulling which I've done before shared notes breakout room and stuff and recall smart slides. So raising hand super easy everybody has a raise hand in the lower right hand corner. I invite you right now if you want to click raise your hand. So what I'm doing is I will see the order in which you raise your hand and the names, and that will persist for me until that dialogue box goes away. So I, I will not be unable to ignore it. And I had the ability to lower hands individually so I can click on. So what I'm doing right now is I'm clicking on individuals names about to lower their hand, and I can click lower hands for all of them. So if you choose there as well. Any student can click on their name and choose a different emoji, raising hand is actually done as one of the emojis. But you can also change your emoji as well and when you do that anyone who changes their emoji will go higher up in the list, in terms of like if they're happy, sad or so on. It's another way to get more of a feeling from people. And it's there in the product. Multi user whiteboard is a very powerful way to engage students. It's you can think of it probably if you're doing one on one tutoring, I have a math problem or something I want to tutor. But we actually have done it a bit different way. We actually allow you to lock it so that students can't see each other's cursors. So let me give you an example. See if I have my world map. I don't. Okay. So, let me just do an impromptu example here. If I turn on multi user whiteboard. And if I asked you to move into the upper right hand corner quadrant of the graph, everybody could do so. And you see everyone else is most moving around right it's like a visual formation, and you can draw. Okay, I'm going to change that slightly. And I'm going to turn off the ability for you to see each other's cursors. So now, I'm going to ask you to point your cursor in the lower left hand corner. Okay, I can see everyone's cursor, and I can see those users that are not moving the most around. I can see a few people that are still in the upper right hand corner. Ah, thank you. Thank you that person to show me example of someone who's doing it improperly. You can use this over and over again. So I'm going to turn off the multi user whiteboard. You can use this over and over again for doing different types of visual assessments. And you could also when the multi user whiteboard students can write text in as well. So there's a text tool here. So if I want to say this is some text, I could see it and I could invite all the students to see it as well. Or to do it in multi user whiteboard. So this is the people that contribute to this course. Aaron Carr actually uses this quite a lot and she gave some of her templates it's in a Google Drive link in the course, and she welcomes anybody to use this as part of visual interaction with your students. Okay. Oh, actually, there was. Okay, let me do this once more. This was the example I met I must have missed over it. Okay, can you point me to Australia. Can you see everybody who's pointing to Australia. That's the whole part. I noticed some people were drawing and I think what you'll find is in a future update the big blue button will actually allow you to remove the ability to draw as well so literally just be visual pointing. But there's an example of where you could think of so many types where if you're teaching something you want people to to see if they're learning, get them to visually point. It's another way to do formative assessment. Pulling which I have already done before the interface and big blue button we try to make it super easy to pull. You can just do true false ABC and D you can put your own choices in you can type a question if you want, you can make the polling anonymous if you want as well as another way of building relationships. That way students don't know, you know, students will know that whatever choice they give. And so they give, you know, in the class it's not going to be the individual persons not visible to teacher. And another way to help build relationships shared notes is another way it is a collaborative area that anybody can write into where you could use at the beginning for setting the agenda or for the end for doing key takeaways. So if you click on the left hand side on shared notes. I have locked it so that students right now can't write in the shared notes here are the shared notes. And I could paste an agenda and so on. I can if I wanted to unlock it and then you all could write on it. Take my word for it, given the size of you students here might be a bit ambitious. But you can use a teacher have control. These controls are in the lock settings and these lock settings allow you to lock down the ability for students to private chat public chat shared notes, share webcams. And also see other people's drawings. This primarily came from a lot of the use of big blue button we see in K 12. And so we wanted to give the teacher ability to manage their class. And that is the ability to lock down certain functionality if it doesn't make sense in the context of their class. We have the ability to randomly select a user. So this is a fun thing to do to engage someone so if I choose random selecting everybody sees a dialogue box they see who was randomly selected. And I can do it again. I can see that another person selected and again. So this makes sure there's no class favorites. Everybody who is if you tell the students okay I'm going to randomly select somebody. Nobody knows who it is so everyone's got to be ready to participate because their name may be called a game big blue button knows that you're trying to teach. It's one of the ways that we help you engage with students. Breakout rooms. So breakout rooms is one of the key ways of engagement and that is taking students and putting them into their own rooms, allowing them to collaborate and then bringing them back. So the way we do it in big blue button is you can choose start up breakout rooms. You can choose the number of rooms up to 24, you can allow students to choose their own room and you can drag and drop names into the breakout rooms as well. And the breakout room start you as a teacher can monitor all the breakout rooms. You can see each users who are in it. You can listen into any breakout room or you can even join a breakout room in a new tab. And so for smaller number of breakout rooms, let's say you have four, we've actually heard of teachers that will open up four tabs. And they don't need to join the audio but that they can just tab back and forth and see what students are doing in all the breakout rooms. Again, giving you visibility into what the collaboration is can help guide you to like, all right, breakout room three is not as far as long. I've given them 15 minutes. Let me spend five minutes with breakout room three to help them. That goes back to getting timely feedback to the students. Smart slides. So this is something that we've had in the product for quite a while. When you have a slide with text, we have that text right now in memory. It's there for screen readers. So if a student has needs to use a screen reader, we're going to provide a text for them. This is different than a video conferencing system, which is just going to you're going to share your screen. And the platform has no idea what your what is on the screen it's just simply sending the bits down. When you upload slides to big blue button, those slides become into memory. You and the teacher have the ability to annotate them multi user whiteboard it's much richer for engagement. And because we have the text and memory, it's not too hard to figure out that hey this looks like a statement followed by four choices. And what we do is we'll give you the teacher of one button that says I believe there's probably four choices here would you like to do a poll by clicking one button. We call that smart slides because it's basically figuring out that the slide has a polling question that goes back to management of the class. If you can set up your slides and you put some poll questions in them. Then when you upload them to big blue button during the live class you can just do one click through the poll. So I have examples here which I'm going to do, and I have a button break down here. So if I, if I click true faults, I just do that with one button. So the question is that Einstein invent the atom. And now I see all the responses coming back live on the left hand side. And at some point I'm going to let enough responses come in. And I will publish the poll. So most people got it correct. Einstein invented relativity, not the atom or probably the way to phrase it that better was discovered the atom. But no Einstein was not the atom was discovered before Einstein came to prominence. The next is a question. So here's another one will do. So let's do a BCD. What are the rings of Saturn made of. I'm doing this at giving you examples of where I'm just going to a slide. I'm clicking one click, and I'm getting live feedback of what the teachers are, or what the students are sort of responding to a publisher results. The correct answer was ice. And I can see that other people had different different ones, but the majority got it correct. I'll do one more. This one is who ran the first four minute mile for any of you sports fans out there. Probably can pick this one out. And again, I'm just doing this with one click and so on. All right, I'll publish the results. This one pretty close. The bee is the correct answer, but other people, I mean, you had to have known this. It's hard to guess the answer. If you guessed it's like one out of four. The bee is actually the correct answer Roger banister. Okay, we've talked about management of the virtual class. We talked about building relationships. And we talked about engagement for learning that is getting the students to apply their brains. The last part, which is critical is assessment. Some in the past, if you've used other products, you might have had a report that was available after the class was over where you could look at some engagement with students. But how does that help you during the live class? I'm in front of 25 students. And I want to know who is, who is responding to my polls, who is in my class, who is active and who's learning based on responses to polls. And we do that with a big blue button with what we call a learning analytics dashboard. And this is a live dashboard that shows what has been happening during the class. So I'm going to, I'm going to share my screen. And I'll do it. See if I can do this. Yes, I'm going to do this in a way that the names will be visible. And then over here on the left, if I come over, you can see there's a few of the names, but I actually have four tabs. I can see how long everyone is in the class. And I can see who's talking their webcam time messages and Moses raise hands. And from all this data I have an activity score. I can see which student was most active. This is a relative score. So if the person who spoke the most is going to get the most points or typed or chatted or raise their hand or respond to polls. But from this, I can actually look at the sea where there students where there was no engagement. That is that, again, there should be no back of the classroom. So if you're teaching students you're halfway into class and you're wondering, who's there, who's been active. And who's learning is based on the responses to polls, you don't have to remember this we have the data for you, we can show you this and you can see it in the separate window so two monitors are great, and it will update every 10 seconds. So if I go back to another view is timeline. So I can see, based on the responses to pull based on the slides that I was shared, where students raise their hands where they engaged. So here's the timeline view. I think there were some raising of hands. Ah, there was. That's when I asked you all to raise your hands it was on these slides. If you were teaching and you're halfway through the class and you knew there were some slides where students raise your hands a lot. You don't have to struggle to remember it. We have the data for you will just show it to you. Same thing with polls. So if you have already done some polling and you're wondering, okay, how are students doing. From this you can see, are there any students that are completely missing based on the correct answers, or was there that some, was there a question that everybody pretty much got wrong, in which case maybe that's a foundation that wasn't as solid as you'd want it to be. You take some time to show it up. All this data is available to download at the end of the session as well. So when you finish your class, big blue button will come up and say the classes ended. Do you want to download the data and there will be a download button in the lower right hand corner, you can download it live of course but you have the choice to download it at the end of the session as well. I have a few screenshots here that I just what I just showed you. This is timeline view so you can see when students for example raise their hands. And you can also click on an individual students name so if you see that there's an activity score, let's say six, you click on their name and you can see how big we button calculate that activity score. This is not a grade. This is literally just a way of summarizing for you at a high level, relative to each student how are they active relative to each other. And from that you can determine ideally, who is maybe, as all classes there's kind of the middle body of the class which is just kind of like engaged on average. There's those that are probably highly engaged and there's those that probably are not as engaged as you want. And those are the ones that may need or may highly benefit from a little bit a few moments of your time. Either, you know, private chatting with them, going to breakout room with them, or just acknowledging with them that hey you see some soaks in the class are struggling. I'm going to follow up with you afterwards you don't have to remember who those are. The data is there and the learning analytics dashboard. And then Moodle helps you out as well so that that data goes back into Moodle and you can set up. If you're familiar with Moodle in terms of activity completion, the big blue button plugin for Moodle. It has the ability to say hey you can mark that activity is completed when the user clicks on it, but you can go further. You can actually market it wasn't students have been active or been participating for at least 90 minutes. And maybe you can say they must have also responded to some poll votes. As the big blue button session ends that data goes back from the learning analytics data, the subset that goes back in the Moodle, which Moodle can then use to compute activity completion. Okay, so I would like to summarize in terms of like what we've covered. We, with my big blue button hat on have been focused for the last 10 plus years and building an effective virtual classroom and today we think about it as the next generation. There are many things that we want to do. In terms of your watching this recording earlier this week. It is July 2022. We held our second online conference which I also talked about the future of online learning, some of this material we've been to that. And also some of the plans we have ahead for big blue button, things like breakout vision and whiteboard vision to give you even more visibility into what students are doing during the live class so you could see those students that need help, and be able to provide feedback. When we design big blue button, we don't do it from a point of view of like what future will be great. We really spend a lot of time with teachers and students. We have boiled that down into use cases across four dimensions. We think about the theory of learning and what does it mean for how our brains work, thinking that if we can understand that and apply bring as much of that into the virtual class as possible, we can help you as a teacher, more effectively teach. And we also think about the class in terms of the structure. So there's the business relationships, the introduction, kind of the main part, and the summary of it. In taking this course online. We've had a lot of fun and creating it. We've gotten feedback from teachers in terms of designing the content, giving feedback. We hope that when you go through it, you get some ideas and insights that you may be able to use in your own virtual classes and teaching online. It hopefully it gives you insight into how we think about a virtual class and how that guides the design and development of big blue button in the future. And we invite you to give feedback as well. There is an associated discussion group with the class, the online course at Moodle Academy. I will be checking that out in discussions. And if you do have any feedback, please participate. Part of Moodle is based on social constructivism and the fact that the effort that you put into maybe sharing some comments or sharing something from your own personal experience about works. It will help shape the course improve it and benefit others as well. The way we like to say it and big blue button is the more you give the more you get back. And finally, if you want to contact you directly, you can reach me there at big blue button.org. And at this point, I'll hand it back over to Anna. Thank you so much, Fred. Just before we close it worth take a look at the public chat. See a little bit the comments and I think we have a couple of questions. The beginning, Elizabeth mentioned that third notes is one of the best futures of big blue button. And Catherine agreed that whiteboard and interactive drawing are so amazing. We have a lot of positive comments from Risky, John, Sam. Sam is asking, can all the breakout rooms be recorded? And I'll answer that. So the question, not today, it is actually mostly implemented. It is one of the plans we have on the moodle side of it to let you set up the recording of breakout rooms. And there's a little bit of nuance to it because in doing the research with teachers, we found there's actually three cases. One case was the teachers didn't want the students to see the recording to breakout rooms at all, just them. The second case was the teachers were okay with students who participated in the breakout room to see just their breakout room recording. And the third case was all breakout room recordings were visible to everybody. It's on our roadmap. It's not there yet. But when we do implement it will give you the control to decide which scenario you want. Thank you. Aziman also asks at the moment that you were showing the learning analytics dashboard. If we can download those data in CSV or in Excel format. You can. We're just in the process of rolling out a new version that when you bring it up, you'll be able to download the data. And it will see it as a button in the lower hand corner saying download data and it'll come to you as a CSV. Perfect. And some made a really interesting comment that actually we are encouraging participants to chat in the class, which is the opposite of his own education. It's interesting how things change. And he also asks, would you tell them how completion is achieved? If so, would this encourage them to gain the system by chatting about the relevance, etc. For sure. Right. Whatever. Like students can say, you know, if I chat lots, do I gain the system? You know, you as a teacher control the class, I think you want them to chat. It's important to students to know that if you want to use the activity score, you know, you probably should tell students that look, if you just do nothing during your class, that's going to be visible to me. I can tell you I can tell and you will not and I maybe give you 5% mark for engagement. Not uncommon that a lot of times there's some participation score. We make it easy for you to see what that score is if it was zeros across the board for a student, you could, you know, to the extent they're listening. They're not participating. I will say, however, that it's up to you to decide how to use the data. Just because a student doesn't do anything in the class, it might not imply that they're not learning. But if your goal is to get students to engage to raise their hand to respond to polls, especially the polls, you will be able to see if there are students who are just simply not responding and you can do with what that data that you decide. We're not doing any value judgment on it, but we realize like a pilot or like a co pilot, if we can give you this data during your, the flight of your virtual class, you can use that you can decide how you use that data to better, to better deliver the class. I want to talk a moment about activity completion. It's actually a feature that has been in the product for a while, and there's probably still a bit more work needed on it. But activity completion has to be turned on my default. Sorry, activity completion is not turned on my default. And the reason is, is there is a mechanism where the big blue button server needs to call back into Moodle to pass that data back. Some Moodle sites may be behind a very restrictive firewall. So we turn it off by default, and then the administrator would go on and, and ideally do a test or two to make sure the data is going back. So by the time of this class, I think that Moodle 4.0.2, there's even some more work going on in the activity completion that will come out in 4.0.3 and definitely in 4.1 to make sure we smooth out some of the more edge cases around it and make sure it works. So I would say this, if you're during the live class, if you tried out, it may not be visible for you yet in Moodle. And if it is visible, if there's any issues that you see with it, I know the developers are working on fixing a few things. Certainly by the time Moodle 4.1 comes out in the fall of 2022 this year, and probably by Moodle 4.0.3. But, but think of it as this is our goal to take advantage of the deep integration with Moodle. But you should feel like information in Moodle and information in Big Blue Button are not two separate views because students have either asynchronous or synchronous engagement with you. The engagement asynchronously in Moodle and the engagement synchronously in Big Blue Button. It is not unreasonable to think of what a unified report might look like to give you a holistic view of the students participation in your class. And that report does not exist today, but it is one of the things that we want to take advantage of by this deep integration to get to a place in the future where we can give you really nice unified or holistic reports of student engagement. And the door is open for that because Moodle embedded Big Blue Button into the core. Yeah, that was a big step for a lot of educators. We have some more notes, comments as Ma says that a lot of ideas from this session million thanks to Fred and Gregory asks how can I let students use Big Blue Button to meet each other without me. So in Moodle, you can set up an activity and Big Blue Button activity and in the role you can change the role so that all students come in as moderators. Actually, let me back up for a second. I think right now if you set up an activity by default students can join it without when you're not there. One of the choices that you can choose to check to say prevents, or it's either checked by default, where you allow students to join, or it's unchecked by default where you must enable students to join without you. So I think by default it's probably they can't join unless you're there already there. So if you set up an activity, you can make sure that that choice is unchecked, and just tell students look I created four activities for you like group one group two group three group four group four, and actually, Big Blue Button activity does support the student or Moodle groups. So if you just create one and you say use the group assignment, then when they go into it they'll automatically be going to a class that is associated with their group. And I may ask, so where do those activity completion conditions come from about the chat, the hand, etc. Yeah, so let me see if I can just bring something up live here, I have an account on Moodle cloud. And let's see if I can just give you a live view of it here. And I just want to make sure. Can't remember if this is available on Moodle cloud, but I'm going to see here. No, it's not it's in the developments site. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to just go into one of our development courses. All right, so in activity completion, you will be able to choose show activities complete when conditions are met, and then you'll see the extra conditions if this is enabled. So you probably want students to view an activity completed. And then you can add additional criteria is that they must be in the session for 90 minutes. And they must have done poll votes. You save that and display it and then if everything's wired up and again if you don't see it it has to be enabled by your administrator. And if the data isn't white isn't coming through, it might be because of a firewall or might be some of the, I think it was one or two edge cases that they're fixing now. You would then test it ahead of time, but just make sure that it does come all the way through before you rely on to a course. But that's where you would see it, you'd see it inside the activity completion. Yes, thank you so much for the live demo. This answers Mary's question and just underlying that that was a demo from a development site. So, you know, it's not at the moment in your site, but it's very close to be there. And we have Eoin asking what is included in the big button service in Moodle 4. So right now, what do we have? Right. So with my, I'll switch to my blindside networks hat. So blindside networks is providing a free service to anyone in the world using Moodle 4. And that means you can enable the big button plugin. It's not enabled by default. You can enable it. And then you can use it for sessions that I think the restrictions are the recordings will last for seven days. You can have up to 25 people in a session. And I forget the other restrictions, but it's enough for you to do a class try to use it. It's certainly not meant for production. If you want to use big button in your live classes for production, there are many choices just like you have with Moodle. You are more than welcome to set up your own big blue button server. If you're technically inclined and this is something you want to do. Big blue button is open source. You're a lot. You can set up your own server. You can set up a pool of servers if you want. There are countries like Germany that during the pandemic, big blue button was, I think, among the most used virtual classroom throughout the state of Germany. There was one state in particular, they set up enough big blue button servers to handle 185,000 concurrent teachers and students across 3,000 sites. They did this all with open source so that the data stayed inside of Germany and they had full control over it. You have that ability with big blue button. You have that just like with Moodle. If you're using Moodle cloud, there's a limited version of big blue button built in the Moodle cloud that you can get if you upgrade. If you're running Moodle itself, you can go to big blue button website and see there's a list of companies that provide commercial support for hosting. If you're working with a Moodle partner, it's a good chance the Moodle partner already resells some hosting for big blue button as well. Then you can just retoit your Moodle partner and say, hey, if you're using big blue button in some regards, how can I get this as a supported part of Moodle? Ask your Moodle partner and they'll probably have an answer for you that says yes, they already resell hosting and that they can provide it to you right away. Perfect. Hannah says that could you show this live rather than with screenshots? Well, I think she was referring to the tools and the features we have in big blue button. And I can say that we have a lot of training tutorials and videos inside the course so you can always check those. Some is asking big blue button decoration with core has been the biggest opportunity for me to challenge skeptics and prove that they can teach online. Thanks, Fred. Yes, I agree with that. Catherine says I have a question. What if the power went off? Is the database will automatically save the ongoing activity assessment? Catherine, that's a very technical question. Big blue button is running on a different server than the Moodle server. So if the power of the Moodle server goes off, anyone who's in a big blue button session, they're all in this separate server in big blue button. If the power of the big, big blue button server goes off, you know, at worst, you will not have any recording of the class at best when the server comes back up. They will find out the meeting's ended and just process the recordings for the class to a point doesn't happen very often. Gregory asks, can students use tools like whiteboard and can we gain information from big blue button recordings or must be live? I know in the pre so when you try out big blue button, if you go get hosting and I'll put my blind sign never sat on for a moment. We do offer hosting, which is we call premium tier. This is in contrast to the free tier, which a lot of Moodle partners also offer similar to the free tier. It's available from Moodle on the premium tier. You will get these the analytics from the learning analytics dashboard after the session as part of recordings. You will only be able to see them. The students won't be able to see them, but there'll be a recording format we call statistics. And from that you can pull out attendance and other things as well. David asks if the slides are downloadable and I can answer this one. Yes, you can find the slides inside the course. They are available now as the whole course is now open and you can take it. You have already answered to Joanie and some asked is it possible to show a PowerPoint slides take live and draw over it. So you can upload slides to big blue button. This is what I've done here and then with that they become they're not video streams. What's been downloaded to your computer is just a slide and that's it. There's no more bandwidth after that except for my drawing, the chatting, the webcam and audio. If you can, you can certainly share your screen as well, but you can't draw over your screen. There are a bunch of open source tools that let you draw over your monitor. And of course the big blue button is sharing the screen. It will see those drawings as well. But you can't, it doesn't allow you to draw over like your screen. So again, you'd use some third party tool for that or some open source tool which allows you to draw. I think there might be a capability in Windows. It's been a while since I checked. And you don't have to upload your slides to big blue button. You're more than welcome to share your screen as I've been doing through the session as well. But if you do upload your slides, you get smart slides, you get a whiteboard and you get the ability to like, if I take back the presenter control, I can zoom in. I can highlight things so I can manipulate the slides and I have a full whiteboard to do it. Perfect. A lot of things that you can actually do. So we hit the hour and our session is about to end. We should wrap up. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being active. Thank you Fred for joining us and enlighten us with all these cool features of Big Blue Button. And what I would like to tell to our guests here is if you like this session, if you found it interesting and you might consider to get involved deeper with Moodle Academy. You can help us grow by contributing to its development by suggesting top ideas. You can suggest topics to be covered in future webinars and online courses. Join our Get Involved course and give your suggestions. You can also contribute to webinars if you have an expertise on a specific subject. You can be a presenter in a webinar of Moodle Academy and of course as a presenter you will gain a presenter's badge. And also you can also contribute to the course development. You can serve your expertise contributing into the development of one of our courses. And of course get the course builder badge. We would love to have you as ambassadors and help spread the word about Moodle Academy and the Moodle Educator Certificate. Inside the academy you can earn a badge, complete courses and get badges. And serve that Moodle Academy is here and help us this community grow. And of course if you are an experienced Moodler and you already use Moodle for teaching, you can go for the Moodle Educator Certification. Take the relevant quiz and see if you are eligible for that. So you can demonstrate your teaching skills with Moodle. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you Fred and I'm about to close the session.