 Hello everyone and welcome. My name's Abby Frye, I'm the communications manager at Moodle and today I'm really pleased to be having a conversation with Fred Dixon, who is the product manager and co-founder of Big Blue Button, the open source web conferencing platform. Hey Fred. Hi Abby. Fred is really timely to have you here for a conversation. Timely for two reasons. Firstly, we all know that the global pandemic has highlighted the massive adoption, explosion really of online education and in particular how critical it is to foster learner engagement through virtual classrooms. It's also timely because Moodle 4.0, which is Moodle LMS's release planned for early next year, is going to include Big Blue Button as a standard integration, which is great news. So I'm really keen to talk to you about all of the features and benefits of Big Blue Button. But before we get started with that, I thought it'd be really nice if you could tell us a bit about Big Blue Button's journey. How did it come to be? Okay. Yes. And the name Big Blue Button, just to get it out there, it was really just meant to be starting a virtual classroom, should be as simple as pressing a single Big Blue Button and the name kind of stuck. So we've had fun with the name over the years and it's pretty distinct. Let me tell you a little bit about the background. So Big Blue Button started at Carleton University here in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and it started in the classroom, not the boardroom. It was from the beginning designed to be a virtual classroom and we're going back to 2007. At that time, we had built it first version with open source technologies and we thought, okay, there is an opportunity here to provide a virtual classroom that would be available to anybody in the world through open source. And at the time, there were many commercial web conferencing systems, but there was nothing really designed for the classroom. Nothing open source for sure. So we thought, okay, there would be a market and if we focused on this market from an entrepreneurial point of view, focus is good, we would expect that universities would move gradually more online, the internet would get faster, computers would get faster, the browsers would get more powerful, and there would just be a slowly increasing demand for online classes. And that's what we did. So from 2007, 2014, 2015, along the way, we focused on integration with various learning management systems, the foremost one being Moodle. Moodle being an open source meant that we could write an integration that was fairly deep inside of Moodle and then over the years, we continued to improve it. And up to about, say, 2020, early, at that point, the integration for Big Boo Button, inside of Moodle, out of the 1400 plugins that were available for Moodle, I think we were like the sixth most downloaded plugin. We eventually became like the second and sometimes even the third, we kind of switched spots. But we had built something that was our intent that would look like a natural part of Moodle. And when you think about classrooms online, and I'll just talk about before the pandemic, there was lots of physical classrooms and the online was meant to be complimented. So students who may be not able to attend classes, maybe they were studying remote, they could participate online. So when you think about what it meant to have an online component for a school, there would always be these two parts. There would be the asynchronous, which is what Moodle provides, logins, year grades, assignments, discussions. And then there would be the synchronous part, which is the virtual classroom. And that's what we focused on. And so we focused on building an integration with Moodle over the years that made it look like part of Moodle, because we could create a very deep integration. Moodle being open source and so is Big Blue Button. Yeah, it will be cool to talk about features, but I'm also wanting to learn a little bit more about your choice of open source. I mean, obviously that provides people the opportunity to download the software at no cost to them in the same way that you can do that with Moodle LMS as an open source platform. But there must be a series of other benefits. He talked about integration, perhaps that's one of them. So the primary benefit and the primary reason why we did open source was a combination of myself and my co-founder Richard Alam. Richard is the CTO. He wrote Big Blue Button. So I wouldn't be talking here without the work that he did back in 2007. He had worked on it over a year. He was taking a master's program at Carleton University in the Technology Innovation Management Program. And his thesis was on open source business models. I had started a number of companies over the years. I'm a serial entrepreneur. My first company ended up raising $13.5 million, had a company of 60 people, and he was doing a web-based data analysis component or product. And I knew at the time how much money we spent on marketing. It was a lot. And I'm a developer by trade. So I thought, okay, maybe if we had taken that money that we spent on marketing and made the product better, and then maybe if we had given the product away, but in a model where the more people use it, the more people want to contribute to it, the open source business model, that if we solve a need that was global, then the product would be adopted around the world. And companies that are providing services and support hosting the traditional open source business model would be able to sell into that market. And that's what we did. I believe that we didn't need to do much on marketing. We needed to focus on building a product that focused on the needs of the teacher when they're teaching an online class, which is different than let's say a business meeting in a corporation. And that that product that was freely available, other people in the world would adopt it, build upon it, and create a commonwealth where the more that they want to improve, they can make improvements and get those back. So open source for us meant that we could take the money we earned as a commercial company. And I should say I do wear two hats. So I'm the product manager of Big Blue Button, and I moonlight as the CEO of Blindside Networks, we're the company that started the Big Blue Button project. We offer hosting and support integration. And if you want to have the product improved, you can pay us or other developers around the world to improve it. And the result was the product got better and better. And as web browsers got better, the internet got faster, computers got faster, you were soon able to do. We were flashed at the beginning. You haven't been flashed for many years, but you were able to do things in the web browser that was real time low latency audio and video. And then by continuing to focus on the needs of the teacher and the student, it meant that through deep integration, engagement and analytics, we were able to offer what was clear to many people used as something designed to help the teacher engage students for the purpose of learning. So a couple of ones. C. Joe Liverpool University in China. Back in February of 2020, they were going offline in terms of our full online learning. University was going towards a virtual model. And we helped them set up a pool of Big Blue Button servers like 15 servers so that they could handle thousands of concurrent students and teachers all with open source. They paid us a little bit of time and effort, but they were able to do it. They were able to run in China and they were able to keep online and stay online. Perhaps the biggest example I'll give you is the state in Germany, Beton Wuttenberg. So Beton Wuttenberg went, Germany is shut down, and they set up 4,000 Big Blue Button servers to supply virtual classrooms to 3,000 schools. And they picked at 185,000 concurrent teachers and students. That's all with open source. That's all with Moodle and Big Blue Button. I like that. It's a journey of innovation and evolution over many years, since 2007, as you say. So the product has continually improved, and that is a key feature of the open source model. And I guess that takes us to the point of thinking about some of the other alternatives that some people out there might be using currently in their workplaces, such as Zoom or Google Hangouts or maybe even Teams. But how is Big Blue Button a better tool? How do you see it as a better alternative for virtual classrooms? Right. So all these products existed long before the pandemic. And very few, many of them focus on the educational market. They were business application. They were team-based applications. The needs of a teacher are very much different than the needs of a manager. A teacher is trying to guide the students through a learning journey. And when you think about what the students have to do, and you have to remember, recognize, apply, assess, it's very much constructivism, which is what the basis of Moodle is. You must do things. You must interact with the work, the teacher, your peers, the content. And by creating things you learn, there are things that you can do in a virtual classroom that you would want to do that these other systems can't. So I'll give you some examples. We think of Big Blue Button in three areas in terms of differentiation. Integration, engagement, and analytics. So a lot of other systems will have like an LTI integration, which is fine. Nothing wrong with it. But Big Blue Button is natively, has a native plugin. It is a plugin that is, as we talked about earlier, is now going into the core of Moodle. So that means we can get more data out of Moodle into Big Blue Button. We can put data from Big Blue Button back into Moodle. It also means that it can peer in parts of Moodle that other LTI tools can't. And the idea is that it just looks like a natural part of Moodle. So whether it's Moodle groups, the calendar, the activity settings that you would see coming across modules, it's all there. We built on top of it and we were passionate about making sure we supported everything that Moodle wanted, everything that Moodle provided a plugin to do. Big Blue Button is not an application. You don't have to install anything or upgrade or worry if your system is compatible for it. If you can run the latest web browsers, you can run Big Blue Button. So that means Mac, Unix, PC, iPad, Android, iOS, Chromebook. They'll all run. And again, the browsers have gotten fantastic over the years. The second is engagement. So when you think about teaching, you really want to engage students. So that's breakout rooms. We do things like multi-user whiteboard, where you can collaborate together with students and draw at the same time. We have shared notes, but you can actually have collaborative area inside. And in terms of like classroom management, a lot of K-12, one of the things like, I don't want students to be able to do private chat. Or I would like to restrict them from seeing everyone else's webcams and just myself. Or I don't want them running on the shared notes. So we provide the teacher the ability to lock down or unlock the students as well. And we have things like raise hand, emojis, everything that you would look for in terms of an online class, but designed for letting the teacher engage the student. So Big Blue Button, probably by the time you see this, the release we have coming out now has something called the learning dashboard, which is, instead of after your session is over, you get like an attendance and you get whether people have participated online. Like, did they ever talk, chat, speak, raise your hand, share their webcam? And the responses to polls would tell you if you're a teacher and you taught for 30 minutes, asked a couple polling questions about the content you just talked, the results would tell you, are the kids learning? I use kids, but adults as well, right? Are the students learning? So we built into Big Blue Button a live dashboard, so that as instructor could have it open, they would see and answer three questions for them. How long have people students been in the class? Are they participating and are they learning? It's based on their responses to polls. So we'll keep that data up to date for the teacher while they're teaching the class. And so these other products will give you reports that are a subset of this, but it's after the class over. So all the other products, great. And we have schools that use all of them, but we find more often than not that teachers that use Big Blue Button find that it's very specific, it's very much built for teaching and learning, like the idea of classroom management, engagement and analytics, and that as a company that's focused on it and as an open source community that has developers and teachers all around the world contributing to it, they see clearly that we are really focused on the needs of the teacher. So I'm sort of pitching myself as an educator here and perhaps it's early next year and my institution has just upgraded to the new release of Moodle and suddenly Big Blue Button is at my fingertips. I can use it. How do teachers tend to get started with Big Blue Button? Right. So I encourage anybody watching this video, go check out like a tutorial video on Big Blue Button. We've recorded a couple of them. It's usually just me sitting down as if I was next to you for five minutes showing you all the key features, but I'll give you a highlight. So first off, it will look like part of Moodle. You'll click a link to join a class and in your browser, Big Blue Button will come up. You'll see familiar things like sharing your audio, your video, your webcam, your screen. You can see chat, you'll see polling. This will look very familiar because we've been using tools like this all along. You'll be able to just interact with students. They'll hear you. They'll see you. You can record it. When you're done, the recording will go back into Moodle. So you'll come back to your course. You'll see the link that you click to join and you'll see the past recordings. As a teacher, you can control whether the students can see those recordings or not. You can make them all invisible to yourself. You can even hide them so that they're not accessible to anybody. The plugin has nice things where if you had recorded some content in the last class or last term and you want to bring that content forward, you can import the links from the previous courses. So they look like they were recorded part of this. Again, how can we make life easier for teachers? As you start using Big Blue Button, you'll start to see more depth with features. Breakout rooms so you can put students in their own group, collaborate together, bring them back, have them present. The polling we've made to be super easy, but if you uploaded some slides, so other products would just have you share your screen. And that means they don't know what's on the screen. They're just sharing pixels. A lot of people with Big Blue Button, we designed it so you could upload your slides. Big Blue Button would parse the content. PDF is good. You do PowerPoint, we'll convert it. And then we'll parse the text of it so that a student with a screen reader would be able to hear the text read back to them. And because we parse the text, we can kind of tell if this is like a poll question. So if you have, let's say, 20 slides of content, and then you want to quiz the students on how they're doing, the next slide could have a title. What year did Einstein release his theory of relativity? You could have four choices below or just have the students, maybe just want students to enter the choice in. We actually, because we scan the text in the slides, we'll put a button there, a quick poll button. We call it Smart Slides. We'll put a quick poll button. With one click, we can say, hey, this had a question with four possible answers. We'll pop up an ABCD poll. So you, as the instructor, present, have a couple, preset your slides with a couple questions, click Next, one click poll, engage the students. Next, engage them, next, engage them. And then the learning dashboard gives you a view of what were the results of the last three polls you just did. From that, you can see where the students were learning, where they're struggling in a certain area. Maybe everybody was good, except there's this one student that got maybe all three questions wrong. So the next time and then later on the session, if you do a whiteboard, maybe you just connect with that student for like 30 seconds to just say, hey, look, you may be struggling, but just keep doing the content. Just review this and it'll, it'll make sense to you by the end of the class. That is an opportunity to engage with students. A teacher using the blue button will see it very easy at the first. We tried to make the UI extremely easy, but you'll see depth in the product and that depth reveals itself as you want to engage the students. It's really about making students active participants in their learning. And then also utilizing data to help you differentiate and identify students who may be at risk or need more support. So there's so many features I can see to really enhance the delivery in a live setting, in a synchronous setting. So we've been talking a lot about education institutions and teachers, schools, universities. Obviously online learning has grown exponentially in workplaces as well. You know, for upskilling, retaining staff, creating a culture of learning, any number of things. Do you see a place for big blue button in workplace environments? Yes. So workplace is more about compliance, but the concepts are similar. The student has to learn and the teacher has to teach. They both have a job they want to accomplish. And then of course in the workplace it is their job. So in terms of an integrated system, you want something that makes it easy for you to engage the students because you've got, let's say, an hour in workplace safety and you probably have compliance. So Moodle workplace, for example, would probably have a lot of rules to say, okay, when an employee comes on board, they have to sign this form, they have to take this course, they have to complete this. Part of that might be they have to do, let's say, an hour health and safety training live, like they have to be in a class. Well, in Big Blue Button, we know if you're there, the whole time, we can see whether you are even active, whether you raise your hand or respond to a poll. And then we could put that data back into Moodle so that later on, when the report is run or the workflow is triggering to say, has the employee completed their onboarded training, we as the Big Blue Button system can provide data back to Moodle to help the company automate that process. These are some of the things we're planning to do in the near future. But that's a good example where the needs of a workplace for compliance are maybe a little bit different than the needs of an educational institution, which is coaching, teaching and training. But there's a little bit more oversight and reporting going on. And because that integration is there, because we have the data, we can get that back into Moodle and help the company streamline its processes for onboarding employees or training employees. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you again for it. And thank you, everyone for joining us today. If you have any questions at all, please visit us by the links on the screen. You can learn more about Big Blue Button at Moodle.com on our Certified Integration page. Or alternatively, visit the Big Blue Button website, bigbluebutton.org. Thanks, everyone, and see you next time. Thanks, Abby.