 So my name is Andrew Bogue, I'm from Catalyst IT and I'm going to talk to you today about virtual classrooms as a student engagement tool with big blue button. So starting off, just starting off in the interactive mode about engagement here at the conference on day three. Well done for making it all for day three. So who here has used a virtual classroom as a student or as a educator? Great stuff. Who here has used big blue button? Very good. Adobe Connect. Blackboard Collaborate. Okay. So a pretty broad set of experience out here but there are some that have not yet used a virtual classroom tool. This talk is trying to be pretty general. I'm not going to go into a long list of feature analysis between the different tools I just mentioned and there are others. I just want to sort of talk about some of the viewpoints that we've seen of virtual classrooms from our recent experiences using big blue button. So first, whenever you talk about big blue button it's important to say thank you very much to Brian Side Networks and Fred Dixon. If you've been to Moots around the world you might have run into Fred Dixon, really, really passionate individual who has done a great job of building big blue button as a free and open source solution with the aim of, as it's written up there, providing remote students a high quality online learning experience. Really passionate, passionate individual. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with him recently in Ottawa with his team when I was there visiting some other clients we have in Canada. So I want to dispel a myth that virtual classrooms are about replacing real classrooms, okay? So we are all the product of real classrooms based on the fact that we're, you know, grown-ups and that's the way it was done in our time and it's interesting to conceptualise that it isn't about replacing traditional classroom environments. There's a couple of things to consider. So first is just basic logistics, okay? So before, you know, in the early days of LMS they were very much a logistical tool. They were about facilitating the ability to send in lots of exams or, sorry, submissions to a lecturer without them having to carry them around, without them having to have a box, right? So they were submitted online. There was a logistical administrative advantage, right, to the organisation. And the same can be said for virtual classrooms and obviously it's easier to arrange people being together when they don't all have to be physically in the same place. Now that's a blatantly obvious statement but it's true all the same. We ourselves use video technology which is different to virtual classrooms to arrange training webinars with some of our clients around tool sets and that's just easier to organise than going on site and arranging for people to be together. It's also quite important that you tend to get a lower level of cancellation as well. You know, if you can't get everyone together sometimes we instinctively cancel it because someone's going to miss out. But whereas even if one or two people turn up to one of these events it's still worthwhile, you can record it. It's just easier in many ways. The other thing is that there are some things that are genuinely superior in a virtual classroom environment. The quietest, shyest student and the most boisterous are sort of on the same level. As we all remember from our school days it's quite possible to hide and spend one's time down the back or be incredibly disruptive, right? Now that's in some ways mitigated with inside a virtual classroom which is a difference. A virtual classroom is not just another video calling tool set, right? So of course there are many plug-ins with LMSs around some of the video conferencing tools everyone uses, whether that's Skype or Zoom or whatever. But virtual classrooms look quite similar in terms of the tool sets they use but the nitty-gritty of the functional offering around the way things like access control is given and the differentiation between a learner and an educator and some of the ways you can call people up into breakout rooms and use collaborative notes and all those things. That's a very different thing to the way a standard video call works. And so from a distance they look the same but in reality there are some quite key differences. So just shortly, big blue button, the features. I mean I don't have a lot of time and there are plenty of sources of information as to all the feature sets. In context it is a very feature rich, competitive offering. So it's LMS integrated, very important that it runs directly from your LMS. That's the idea I'm about to do a demo shortly if everything works. So it allows you to share your webcam and your audio of course. You can upload presentations. It has a chat facility. There's the use of multi-user whiteboards, shared notes, breakout rooms, recorded sessions. Now there's more to it than that but there's a broad spectrum of the sorts of things you can use in a virtual classroom experience. So the big news in big blue button over the last sort of three to six months and it's been coming a while is no more flash. I don't know if anyone's aware that big blue button for quite some time used flash in the browser. This was a necessity based on what you needed to do in the past in order to get access to the webcam from a browser. So it was just the way it was but it caused quite a few problems and more and more as flash is sort of on the way out and has been for some time. But the team at Blindside along with many contributors have now managed to reimplement the client and the browser client in HTML5. So they now have what they call the unified user interface where you get this browser based unified interface across all devices which is pretty awesome and all in HTML5. So it's sort of a need just work category and less audio video doesn't work and that's never happened to anyone in this room has it. So demo time. So I'm going into a middle site. The great thing is here is that we're using the middle cloud. The middle cloud has big blue button installed ready to go for anyone who wants to use it. Sorry. Okay. Oh, okay. Tech support. Tech support. All right. So what do I need to do there? What do I need to do that? It was working before. Do I need to shine it across? There we go. Okay. This is going to be interesting. Okay. Right. So we're going to this is my hypothetical Russian language 101 course. I'm a bit of an amateur linguist so I thought I'd make this a bit real. We've got some learners coming along. This is using the middle cloud. So where we go? We enter this course and we... I'll just make that a bit bigger. And we go into our weekly tutorial. I might have to do one small operation here. So let's join the session. I'm going to mute this because let's not try and make audio part of the equation because that's sure to be a disaster. But you can see what's happening here. This is all just using a browser. I will say yes. It comes on and connected. DecoTest is expecting me to make some noise now. Click, click, click, click, click. And now it's going to say yes. Yep. There we go. I mean, assuming... What happens in reality is that actually... So I'm just going to upload a presentation quickly. Just quickly. And then if we go... Just uploading our presentation. Okay. So this is our screen here. So now we've got one, two, three, four participants down there. My loyal, great students. So as you can see the interface on the left, we've got our students here. Let's make that slightly bigger. We have chat on the right here. And there's also sort of quite granular control of who's muted and who's able to... Actually, I'll turn my webcam on. And who's able to do what? But I mean, I'm the instructor. So I'm sort of the boss in this particular environment. So here I am here. Hello, everyone. So first one is we've got our Russian language 101. Let's talk about that. Great stuff. Nice iconic picture of Red Square. Moving on to our first part of the course, which is let's get everyone to practice writing some letters. And away we go. So Alex, this is the interactive multi-user whiteboard. So let's practice writing some Russian letters. Okay. Well done, everyone. That's really, really... That's quite underwhelming. I can see the standard of handwriting is seriously deteriorated since my time. No one's quite able to write the literal ABC. But no, great work. Great work. So I'll give everyone a high five there. Excellent work. Excellent work. Thanks. You all graduate. And now we'll remove the evidence so we never have to talk about it again. So, yep. So I turned that off. Great work, everyone. Excellent. Thanks for your time. So let's just wipe that off. Now, thanks very much. So moving right along, we've done our writing practice now, and that was incredibly collaborative. And you can see everyone's really happy to be involved. So the next... Now we're moving on to our next part. And we'll just throw out another great tool in virtual classrooms is quizzes. They call them polls here in Big Boo Button. That's why we've got our question here, and I'll start a poll. So it's popped up with a question on everyone's screen. You can't see it because I'm the presenter. And we choose the ABCD. So it's gone there. And we can see here the four participants over the left, and they've all answered. Way to go. And until I... So they've all provided an answer except for one. And now once I put publish poll results... So now you can see the results on there. And we've got... That's a fair bit. One of each. Someone's bound to be right. So you have... So that actually says... What is it? How do you say dog in English? The answer was D. So well done, whoever got D, which was poor. Excellent work. So we just collapsed it away. And away we go. So that's an incredibly successful virtual classroom you've just witnessed. And everyone's graduated my Russian language 101 course. So there's 100% success rate. And we'll be going to market soon later in the year. But the thing about... The thing about Big Boo Button, which is really impressive at this point, is sort of the just work factor. I mean, that... We threw that together this afternoon. No... We're not educators. And there was no special magic done with any of the browsers having to be updated or any of that sort of stuff. And that's really the measure of success in a virtual classroom solution or an audio video solution these days because everything sort of has to work. So I'm just going to try to magically change back to these slides. Okay. So, yep, demo time. So I just want to let everyone know that Catalyst Provide, Big Boo Button has a really, really enticing free tier model for everyone to use it because the best way to assess a virtual classroom solution is not necessarily to go to market with a 67-page document with all your requirements. It's to actually use it, right? So that's what we suggest is you try it out and make use of it and see if it's something that you can apply. And there is a commercial model with some extra offerings around things like perpetual recordings of sessions and some other stuff. But it's ready to go for your use as is and you can use it on Moodle Cloud. Anyone can log in and create an account on Moodle Cloud or you can install it in your own Moodle. And Catalyst is providing an association with Moodle. Come up and talk to myself or someone else at the Catalyst booth. A three-month support and support in installing the Big Blue Button plug-in to your Moodle instance. So we'll be happy to talk about that. That's an offer here at the Moodle. And also we can help about all sorts of other things in the world of Moodle or anything that you feel the discussion to talk about with open-source technology. Thank you very much for your time and questions. I don't know if you've got any questions. Can you pre-schedule sessions in that for people to look into and then have their attendance marked? You can. There's still some... You can. There's still some work being done around... I'll have to get back to you on some of the metrics around completion potentially as an assignment. But you can pre-schedule sessions and you can get metrics out of it. There's some actually reporting dashboards you can get as well. So there's... Yes, broadly. So that's sort of a good demo of it in sort of like a lab or that's a tutorial type situation. But if we wanted to do... So we currently run live streams for a lot of our lectures that are oversubscribed. So we have a production type set up where we have an RTMP end point that we hit at Microsoft Stream. But could this handle that kind of thing? Could it handle hundreds of people? So it would be more like all the webcams down the bottom not there and handle an import from Wirecast or something like that. Potentially, but that sounds a little bit more like lecture capture and broadcast to some degree. It is, but people also want sort of ways for the online audience to interact in a way that they could if they were in... if they're in the room. So I think there's... those two things are slowly merging together. They are. I mean, there are logistical challenges to having too many people. I spoke about this with Fred within a collaborative session, right? I mean, things like video cameras and the ability to sort of filter out noise. The numbers that I heard Fred speaking about for the limits of a session with something around 50, I believe, but that's what they've tested it to. But it's not to say that those discussions can't be launched and, you know... and once again, at least things can be tested and they're very, very happy to talk to anyone about their needs and how they can work with them. So, you know, you can certainly... you can support sessions where you're only a viewer. So, conceptually, that works fine. I was just interested to know how recordings managed and where they hosted with Big Blue Button. So, they hosted...it depends, right? I mean, if you're talking about sort of sovereignty and physical location, that depends. It depends on which server you connect to. There is a server here in Australia, but there are also ones in... I think the one we're actually using there was in Canada, so it shows how sort of mature the offering is. There's some control about that, but it's hosted in Big Blue Button's environment at the moment, but it's visible via Moodle. There are some restrictions on how many recordings you can see in the free plan, but it's visible via Moodle and played via their infrastructure, but you can download it and take it if you wish. And look, they're a great small... I mean, they're a small, flexible company, so if you engage with them and say, this is what we need and these are the constraints we have, which is generally around things like data sovereignty and physical location, then they're happy to have those discussions and, as I say, they do have a presence here in Australia. They've got physical infrastructure here in Australia, so that's a big step towards where many organisations need to be. Thank you very much, everyone.