 All right, welcome everybody awesome mood so far. So I'd like to ask a question a show of hands How many people here have heard of big blue button? Okay, and keep your hands in the air. How many people use big blue button? Awesome. All right, so Brief introduction. Hi, I'm Fred. So I'm the co-founder of big blue button Inc I've been managing the big blue button projects since 2007, which is like 14 years or so I also moonlight as the CEO of blindside networks. We're one of the sponsors and we're out there on the hall and For those of you that ever use big blue button. I'm all with them side of Moodle There's three people. Hey, switch. Hey, Sue Sridhiko Shmiso Javaza and Laurent David who are here at the conference and they are the ones who have built a plug-in for you So if you see them in the hallway, just shake their hands give them. Thanks All right, so they're two company or two brands here associated. So Blindside networks, we started the project in 2007 in the last two years has been insane we've hosted over 25 million minutes of virtual classes for over a million educators and Big blue button. Of course, it's an open source virtual classroom built by educators for educators And I'll expand on that and the hint is we're not a videoconferencing system All right, open source is super important to our project So I'd actually rift off of what Martin put in terms of the importance of open source. So We've open source big blue button It's amazing to see all the servers around the world that have been all the people around the world using big blue button I'll give you three examples We listen to educators We say that we're built by educators for educators and I'll expand on that and We also engage the developer community. So we have a community of over 150 developers worldwide Lots of people in our mailing list and I only speak one language where we're localized into over 55 of them and in terms of sustainable revenue model Blindside networks has been at this for 14 years and We have grown. I think we work with 29 of the Moodle partners here So if you're looking for big blue button and you work with the Moodle partner ask them they can probably help you out Three examples. The first one is Baden Wuttenberg who he is here from Germany Okay, awesome. So Baden Wuttenberg actually the state of Germany went live with big blue button They have 3,000 Moodle sites and at the peak using big blue button. They were able to support a hundred and eighty-five thousand Teachers and students each one of those we cared about each one of those we built big blue button for and was so great to see it The second example The country of France the French Ministry of Education Has deployed big blue button as a state webinar system and it is moving it through the school system So again just huge numbers, but that's the entire country It's important to them not only that it was open source But it was data student privacy and digital sovereignty, which is what you can get with open source as well And the third this was working with Moodle US We deployed big blue button on site at Gov cloud one for the US Air Force very large deployment again running with inside their network With Moodle workplace Okay, so let me give you a story in three parts the past president future and the past was sort of when Thanos Snap his fingers and we kind of lost three years But it opened up the world for open source for virtual classes So 2000 this was what blindside networks went through this is our own and hosting So we were we were down here and then we got all the way up there So in the space of about three or four months, we increased our hosting to 60 times in size However Not all was great And for all the students that went online for all the educators that went online I think we could all agree that it wasn't the best experience and I say that because of a few things One is a lot of us had little training a lot of schools used video conferencing system not virtual classrooms and a lot of them cobbled together third-party tools and they kind of struggled to access To assess students progress So this quote from the UNICEF 463 million children worldwide who are unable to access remote learning during COVID that is just not acceptable Right. This is one of the sustainability develop goals that we have to reach is every student should have access to high quality online learning experience So why was the struggle? Well, this is kind of a simplified, but it kind of captures a sense video is a component of us in effective virtual class But it's not the entire virtual class So yes, we do video, but why did instructors struggle if they just had video just video and screen sharing? So it's a complex, but it actually boils down to there's three sort of overlapping needs What are the needs of the educator and the student? What is learning theory because this is an online course and what does technology tell us? So we spent a lot of time working on this. So we basically took each of these three things and we broke it down into individual constituents Pedagogy has been around for a hundred years. So why would you not take that into account when you're building a virtual classroom a? Couple of things here like in terms of how our brain works Social constructivism, which of course is what Moodle's built on and then we learn in stages, which I'll talk about in a moment And then the technology what you can do if you should be able to do in an online class and then the needs of the educator and the student So just you've all seen this it's Bloom's taxonomy. This is how our brain works Like we go from remembering something all the way to creating it We just that's the way our brain works. So the virtual classroom should have an appreciation and understanding of this If you look at this is actually kind of three groups of how blooms works And if you stare at it long enough, you can see well the first ones are Memorization long-term to short-term The next stage is kind of like applied learning This is where the brain is rewiring and understanding something through application and then with application and creativity You can master it. So the real learning is kind of occurring at those higher stages okay, so the Use cases for an educator and a student should be front and center when designing a virtual classroom So in terms of like the millions of minutes we delivered Recently we've done probably over 20 focus groups interact with hundreds of educators and students and we broke down this complexity Delivering an effective virtual class and the sort of four foundations I'm gonna walk them through because this is where we're gonna get to the future So as an instructor you want to be able to set up and manage your classroom for success And you want to be able to establish relationships, which is presence and trust with and between your students So students feel comfortable to apply themselves For engagement you want to effectively engage your students so you can activate their minds for learning That's the higher levels of blooms taxonomy This is in contrast to just sitting and watching a live presentation where you don't interact you do nothing And assessment so the teacher the educator really wants to know how students are doing in their class assess their performance and give timely feedback and The student well the student wants to be able to feel comfortable to participate Effectively master new skills and receive timely help and struggling so That's it if you can do those seven use cases We argue that you can deliver an effective class and by following those use cases It guides us in terms of development of big-loop button so we can provide the tool for delivering effective virtual classrooms So what does this framework tell us about the role of the virtual class? Well? If you stare at it long enough, you'll see that the first two really support the third and the fourth and it really comes down to Engaging the students like activating their minds for learning. That's the applied learning and helping them when they struggle So if I were to bar this down to a sentence the role of an effective virtual class is to Maximize the time for applied learning and feedback feedback tells a student that this teacher is aware of them cares about them and supports them So let's take a look at this now in the context of what we're doing today and in the future So the present So I'll go through these money of you know big-loop button, but just to hit some of the points and where we have applied learning So multi-user whiteboard really happy with this one the newest Capability as you as the instructor can turn on multi-user whiteboard and the students can't see each other's pointers This opens up capabilities where you could say okay point out to me where Spain is most people got it right Shared notes is a great example both in the main session and breakout rooms Pulling this built-in you don't have to use a third-party tool in fact It's fairly intelligent that when you bring up a slide that has like a couple choices It actually says hey, I think you've got a poll question. Would you like to have one button to do a poll? And so what that means is if the instructor comes to the big-loop button session uploads their slides And they have things like hey, there's a true false. There will be a button there to do one button click true false poll Same thing here is another example. You don't have to type anything in you just get one button You'll do an abcd poll Helping the instructor manage your class save time engage students Recently we allowed the you to have multiple responses back from your students And of course we have breakout rooms as well assessment so You are teaching the class you are halfway through it. You're probably wondering a couple questions about your students so I'll contrast this with a video conferencing system if you ask your students to share video and you Have got 30 students and 10 of them are not sharing video. They're invisible to you so The instructor is asking how do I assess the performance so far of my class? groups or individuals so what we did Looking at these use cases it led us to saying well We have to provide the instructor live analytics during their virtual class so they can access performance And so what we did was we created what we call the learning analytics dashboard It opens up another window. I have a couple screenshots But it gives you the ability to see the performance of who's in my class Who's participating and who's learning based on responses to polls? So a as an instructor you have the ability to launch it and Here are some screenshots. So at first off it'll tell you exactly how long each of your students have been in your class He will also create an activity score based on their Polling raising hands talking chatting and this this is not the grade but this is to tell you that if you're trying to engage your students and Some of them are just not doing anything and this will make it visible to you Our goal was that there would be no back at the classroom with big blue button There would be no invisible students to you you could see what was going on you could respond to it in Terms of the polling you don't have to remember the polls if you're halfway through the class And you've done a couple polls the polls provide like formative assessment you can see the results of all of them and you can pick out as a particular student or group of students that are not Responding or you know getting the questions wrong Recently we added the version we just released had a timeline view So this means that if you are instructor you're halfway through your session some students have raised their hands You don't have to remember which slides they raise their hands on if you're trying to review the material You could go to timeline view and you can see it for every student. We've had this activity score We now show you how it breaks down. It's a relative score So if the average class at the average and the people in the class had Responded to like three polls you would get a lower school if you hadn't responded Same thing with talking and chatting and so on so it shows you that if somebody isn't active You can at least know that to take it to take your advantage of it or to respond to it And we give you as the instructor the ability to download the data as well All right, some cool things as well that we're working on so how many here have heard of TL draw Okay, how many have heard of Figma or Miro? Yeah, okay, so TL draws an awesome open-source project for whiteboard It has all the capabilities that you'd expect in a modern whiteboard platform So we are building this into big blue button and this actually is being supported by the French Ministry of Education We wanted like a world-class whiteboard and big blue button. So we're working with this project It's replacing the existing whiteboard and you'll have all the capabilities like moving things around drawing Really nice writing and this will come back. This will be in big blue button in the fall This also makes it possible for us to actually get content back from the breakout rooms as well So going back to getting students to apply themselves in breakout rooms Which is one of the most effective way they can write on the whiteboard and that content that they write We'll come back in the main room that the instructor could then use to do how the students present Today big blue button is built into Moodle. We worked on the integration for 10 years and Our goal was to make big blue button look like part of Moodle But if you didn't have big blue button in Moodle something was missing So now it feels really good because today we can say big blue button looks like part of Moodle because it is Part of Moodle it is now in the core and it was a lot of effort by the developers I mentioned earlier on to get there But we wanted to have like a deep integration with Moodle and that deep integration opens up more ways that we can improve the virtual classroom experience One of the ways you can do today is we have activity completion So those analytics that I showed you for the live analytics dashboard a Portion of those go back into Moodle when the session is done And if in Moodle you have set up activity completion like Marcus activity is completed when students have been present for more than 90 minutes Moodle now knows about this and he can market active but market activity is completed for you We also worked with The team at the Moodle Academy and what we did is we created a course on delivering effective virtual classrooms using big blue button Some of the material in terms of the use cases and the research that we did earlier I presented or showed here that flowed into the development of the course So if you go to this course, it doesn't just say here's how to upload slides or that it starts first from like What should an effective virtual classroom do and then how should it do it and what should it provide using instructor? And then we show you how you can do that in big blue button. So it's more Pedagogy based so if you're if you have instructors using big blue button You know we can develop the platform But we know that there's an important component of being adept or proficient at teaching online as well We want to make that as easy as possible for teachers But there's some techniques and there's some of ways of approaching teaching online We tried to we covered that in that course. So it's free. It's about two and a half three hours self-paced and If you complete it you get a badge. So really how good is that? Okay, the future so There's so much that we want to do and then what we get feedback from so many educators so many commercial companies so many Moodle sites all around the world. So I didn't want to go through 20 things But I wanted to go through a few things that were really thinking about for making virtual classes more effective for educators Let's go back to this all that research that we did the seven use cases how the brain works What's possible in a virtual classroom? You can boil it down to you know maximize the time for applying learning and feedback and to get that feedback You need to be able to assess and you want to be able to do it live during the class Right that visibility that there's no back of the classroom. You have visibility to how students are doing So there's a context here. It starts with Moodle. You go into the virtual class and you return back to Moodle Moodle knows about your students. Moodle knows where students are struggling Right, there's been lots of work done and research done in terms of like trying to identify at-risk students and We looked at a lot of this and some of it is like machine learning and will you know do lots of analysis But sometimes it's really basic like if a student hasn't submitted the last two assignments There's a high correlation that they're not going to pass So that information is in Moodle But why should it stay in Moodle when you go into your virtual class? Shouldn't any information related to students who are at risk be visible to you inside your virtual class? so this example here would be Like wouldn't it be great if you went in and you had 30 students and two of them had kind of like a little warning And then you looked at it and said hey Moodle is telling you that it doesn't have these last two assignments During your class. You may take some extra time to help those two students out This if this was today, and I said to you hey, we're gonna remove this feature You'd be like why like this is important for virtual class But it doesn't exist today because again most people have been using like a video conferencing system that has no idea What's going on with the virtual classroom? breakout rooms Okay, so breakout rooms are like by far one of the most effective ways to get people to to apply themselves an active learning and This goes right back to social constructivism as well. We learn by helping other people So in the class it doesn't have to be the entirely the teacher the teacher getting students to go into breakout rooms Students are helping each other out. Of course the student is trying to help someone in the breakout room has to think about How do I communicate this you know clearly? The student who's in the breakout room receiving the help is getting benefit and students watching this are getting modeling behavior of teaching and learning But the instructor these shouldn't be dark to the instructor the instructor should see what's going on the breakout rooms So what we want to do through something we call breakout vision is give them Visibility in terms of what's going on and if you see a breakout room that is low activity Go into that breakout room help them out help those teach help those students out so we want to give you visibility into what's going on so that you can take time and and Give feedback and help out students This next one I cannot wait to do this one whiteboard vision So I'll give you the scenario you're halfway through the class and you want your students to work on something for ten minutes again applied learning when you do that let's say it's a Math problem, and you've got like three quick questions You want them to do and in them doing that they're going to be using the whiteboard, right? So all that work that we're doing to put in like a world-class whiteboard comes to fruition here So imagine that you could see the whiteboard activity of 12 students Big blue button knows which one's moving the mouse around There's three questions for students to answer big blue button knows if the answer is correct or not And it starts sorting it for you so that the students that appear to be struggling appear in the upper left You click on them on the right hand side You go into a one-on-one session with the student where they see you you see each other They can you hear each other and you're doing a shared whiteboard and now you can help that student out in their time when they're struggling It tells the student that the teacher is aware of me cares about me and helps me out You do that for a couple students and you come back That is far more effective because you're there to help them out and the students perceive Far more value from the virtual class than just passively watching it So whiteboard vision and actually I'll go back to that the idea is that after that is done the content would come back into Moodle so either the Assessment of it or the the scoring of it like we want to get that data back into Moodle Looking ahead there's a couple of things we want to do so you might have picked it up marching Martin mentioned matrix yesterday So it's a it's a decentralized collaborative environment Moodle will get it matrix will get into Moodle at some point and what that means is that we want to be able to Support Moodle is or matrix as well that if you have a discussion in your class and you move into the virtual classroom That discussion could move with you. It's just a matrix channel so you have this concept of a continuous learning environment where the These asynchronous and the synchronous now start to become more closer more merged and again Students can pick up what they may be discussed in their in the class They can discuss it inside the virtual classroom and then of course that discussion is back in the main classroom We want to look at creating a plug-in architecture And this is just going to allow us to accelerate build up on top of our open source community where other people can contribute to big blue button right now If you want improvements, they go into the core But if we can create a plug-in architecture other people around the world could use us even more as a platform to build a better virtual classroom And I've talked about it a couple times But I'm really looking for ways that we can get more data back into Moodle and then through Moodle We can generate unified reports I want you to be able to as an instructor or an educator go into Moodle and see a report that says Here's performance of my students inside of Moodle And here's performance inside of the virtual class and have them come together one report one unified report Of course giving the instructor visibility and performance and maybe finding those students that are outliers that need some help Okay to summarize The video conferencing is not a virtual classroom. It is not purpose fit as we believe In going through the analysis of what we look at the foundations how the brain works How the technology should help the teacher? We believe that you can you teachers could and should have a better tool for doing virtual classes We achieve that by focusing on the needs of the teacher and student. It's not a business collaboration It's a virtual classroom and by doing that we can achieve a deep understanding of what the teachers and students are trying to do in the virtual class and then use that to guide our development and In terms of our development, we're open source We are working with a worldwide community of educators teachers commercial companies sovereign nations And we're all focused towards one goal We want to deliver the best virtual classroom, and I'll use Moodle here to empower teachers to improve our world Thank you Wow Okay, we have about five minutes for questions. Does anybody have a question for Fred? But thank you for bringing us an alternative solution for Virtual classroom But there's still some weak points in the big blue burden because if you want to engage a student you must have a really stable audio and this is something you cannot master in your classroom because some Networks are very unstable and Another feature that is missing is the ability to export recordings So is it something that? We will see you next all right, so the first one stable audio video the network connection we realize like We think the network has come so far like Spain is like amazing network from what I've heard like Credible, but that's not the case for everywhere in the world in many ways the pandemic forced a lot of Universities colleges to go online it also forced improvements for some of the networking around the world to get that 463 million have more opportunities But yes, we're dependent upon the network and maybe there's I think there's things we can even do better in the future But we're also thinking about that future would look like there will be a world coming where you don't Care about sell bar or bars on your cell phone anymore You'll just be always connected in in that world We want to build the best virtual classroom that anybody any teacher in the world any educator could connect with any student in a platform That understands what they're trying to achieve The second one was can you have the Recordings as a video I didn't put it in the slide because there's lots of things for doing the next release coming up I into the year will give you the recording as a video file The video board is very exciting the whiteboard and and I guess you've chosen the best that's out there to integrate Now when you're using that I use it all the time with outside Ones like Miro you're creating knowledge with the students They're creating and we've got to use that again later. Is that going to be exported or is that just captured in that one? Video session and you just have to take screenshots to remember it So we'll make it easy for you actually to download the entire document with all the whiteboard annotations this is the version coming this fall and The you kind of touch on a point where we want to get to a continuous learning environment I mentioned the terms of context with Moodle by matrix, but it you know the future for us is like The virtual classroom is your virtual classroom. So imagine I'll use a physical example imagine your teaching Psychology 101 and the university or college says that's your classroom We we have dedicated that building now that that physical classroom for you You can put up posters you come back in everything's were exactly where you left it If we can get there with big blue button where you have a continuous a classroom where maybe the whiteboard might and Whiteboard marks you did in the last class are there for you as well along with the chat along with the shared notes So that is in the future. So one continuous classroom environment So you can personalize your environment right and build relationships with the teachers and students and use that to help learning and teaching We've been having lots of issues with firewalls using big blue button And I see more people nodding any clues in how to solve this come talk to me afterwards If your servers on the internet, it's good If the servers behind a firewall challenges if your students behind a firewall challenges, but come by and talk to us