Anatoly Contribution

For Whom is this page ?

This page is intended to complete overview of how Big Blue Button & Seneca collaboration started, some findings that I made during my work in CDOT. Some of the information will definitely will be useful for you if you are new to the Big Blue Button, and want to ge short insight on what is happening.

Where to start ?

My first couple of months I spent research and exploring Big Blue Button.

Good thing for you, that I have documented most of my research, and you don't have to go through all this process again.

My exploring of Big Blue Button started with these blog posts:

• BigBlueButton Interactions with system (RTMP, NGINX, HTTP) (blog post)

• Big Blue Button bbb-web (blog post)

• Big Blue Button Voip (blog post)

Why Big Blue Button ?

One of the alternative to Big Blue Button, that are used in Seneca is DyKnow

Drawbacks of DyKnow for Seneca:

• Software Installation Required
• Does Not work on Most mobile Devices
• Requires Expensive HP tablets

Big Blue button solves most of this problems. However, there are some things that Big Blue Button lacks (at least at this point)

List of "must-haves" for Seneca:

• White board capturing feature
• Ability for students to write on the whiteboard with stylus (most probably using tablets)
• Feature that gives authority to teacher to erase what students wrote.
• Ability to distribute slides/notes to students by clicking a single button
• Ability to create/publish/save/delete polls for Teacher
• Ability to scroll up/down left/right and many more
• Integration of Big Blue button with Seneca's system

All this was discussed on the meeting with Fred Dixon (CEO of Big Blue Button) and staff members. There are audio recordings and snapshots of whiteboard from this meeting.

Polling Module

We collaborate to meet Seneca's requirements and allow staff members to switch to the new, better system.

As a first part of collaboration, we decided to create polling module.

All the steps i took in creating polling module can be found here:

Progress Map

There are also couple of demo videos that can be found here:

My Blog

From Author

Any other information that can be useful can be found on bigbluebutton-dev group and on our wiki page.

It was pleasure working with you, and hopefully we will cooperate in future!

Regards,

Anatoly Spektor

P.S

If you have any questions you can always contact me using one of the two ways:

• leave a comment to myprogrammingblog.com for the post you don't understand, and I will be more than happy to help you
• write me an email to - me@anatolyspektor.com