BigBlueButton – web conferencing system designed for online learning

Last Updated on July 10, 2021

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for online learning. BigBlueButton’s web conferencing platform enables educational institutions to deliver their courses online, with high quality slides, voice, and video collaboration at a fraction of the cost.

BigBlueButton supports sharing of slides (PDF and any document readable by OpenOffice), webcams, whiteboard, chat, voice over IP (using FreeSWITCH), and presenter’s desktop. It can record and playback sessions (slides, audio, and chat), is cross-platform, running on Mac, Unix/Linux, and PC computers, and is supported by a community of developers.

BigBlueButton is built using over fifteen open source projects including Flex SDK, Gralis, Ghostscript, ActiveMQ, Red5, Redis, FreeSWITCH, SWFTools and many others.

Features include:

• Multiple audio and video sharing, presentations with extended whiteboard capabilities.
• Whiteboard controls let you annotate and call out key parts of your presentation for viewer.
• Supports voice over IP (VOIP).
• Records and playback (archives) all activity in the session for playback:
  • Mouse movement.
• • Whiteboard marks.
• • Pan/Zoom.
• Control the audio of all users and you can make anyone presenter (including yourself).
• Annotate presentations:
  • Built-in whiteboard tools allow you to zoom, highlight, draw, and write on your presentation to make your point clear to remote students.
• Share webcams, offering on-line tutoring, small group collaboration, and distance education a personal touch.
• Accessibility features for blind students using screen readers.
• Support for MS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) 1.0. This means any LTI consumer can integrate with BigBlueButton without requiring custom plug-ins.

Website: bigbluebutton.org
Support:
Developer: BigBlueButton Inc
License: GNU LGPL 2.1+

BigBlueButton is written in JavaScript and Java. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Java with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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