Welcome, everybody, to Big Blue Button World 2023.
This is the keynote address.
This is the kickoff.
My name is Fred Dixon.
I am the CEO of Blindside Networks, the company that started the Big Blue Button
Project.
I am also the co-founder of Big Blue Button Inc.
In this keynote, I will be going through the roadmap and kind of laying the land
for how we think about the roadmap and sort of some broad perspectives on the
project overall.
So let's start off with a little bit of engagement.
I'll just ask everybody, how long have you been using Big Blue Button?
OK.
I see the responses coming in.
All right. Very cool.
I'm going to publish it.
So there are some people that have been using it over 10 years, which is
awesome.
And let me ask you this.
What is your area of interest or your primary role?
This will just help me get a sense of the audience.
I see some teachers, some students, some developers.
I'm watching those results come in live from Big Blue Button, elements,
administrators, instructional designers, director of online learning and a few
others.
OK.
And we'll publish.
And so cool.
So lots of administrators, interestingly, and lots of developers,
which may be not interesting, because this is also the developer
conference.
All right.
Yes, I could have turned on multiple selection for those, please,
Letia.
All right. So another fun one.
Could you just point out where you are in the world right now?
Where are you coming in from?
Very cool.
Lots of people from a lot around the world.
I see lots of Europe.
Well, everyone can see it.
These are people from Africa.
Very cool.
All right.
Let me get into the meat of it.
And I'm going to talk for probably about 30 minutes.
And please ask questions in the chat.
There are other people here in the project that will respond to you as
well.
And let's have some fun.
I'm going to share lots of information about the project, sort of where we
are and where we're going.
So Blindside Networks, we started the project in 2007.
And since then, we have hosted over 2 billion minutes, that's billion
with a B, of online classes in the past three years alone.
And Big Blue Button Project is 14 years now in the making.
So what is Big Blue Button?
It's an open source virtual classroom and so much more.
But to kind of give you the picture of Big Blue Button, let's
start with the why we exist.
Can anybody in the chat tell me what this picture is?
Who goes to the person who can tell me what it is?
Sunrise?
Skyline?
No.
Benjamin.
Correct.
That is us.
This is Voyager in 1990.
Just before it, 24 minutes before it powered down its cameras, they took
look back at our solar system and they took pictures of the planets.
That's us.
That is the pale blue dot.
That's all we've got.
That's our planet.
And so can you talk about roadmap?
This is the roadmap for the world.
This is the sustainable development goals from United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.
This is our map.
This is our roadmap.
No poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education.
So it's number four.
That is one of the sustainable goals that we all as a country are
working towards.
We have work to do.
There are approximately 264 million kids around the world that have
no access to education.
That's roughly equivalent to 8% of the world's children.
So picture a neighborhood that has 80 homes, 10 of those homes,
there's no education.
None.
So I believe a lot of us here are already privileged.
We have access to the Internet.
We're actually able to join the session.
The world is not equal.
And to get us to a better future, we've got to get education
available, quality education available to everybody.
So the why of Big Blue Button exists is we believe everyone in
the world should have access to quality education.
That's sustainability goal number four.
And we do this primarily or one of the key components is open source.
We did not build Big Blue Button when we started in 2007 as a
closed proprietary project.
That wasn't going to get us to the goal.
But by doing it as an open source project, it meant anyone
around the world can contribute towards it.
And today we are localized into over 55 languages.
So by making Big Blue Button available to everybody, we go
after the goal of giving everyone access to a quality education.
So that kind of leads into what we do.
I mean, we could say we do Big Blue Button, but really we help
teachers teach and learners learn.
We do it online.
We do it through virtual classrooms.
But in general, someone came up to you and asked what Big Blue
Button does or what do they do?
We help teachers teach and learners learn.
We do it online.
But Big Blue Button is actually more than the platform itself.
There's actually about five key components that we see for Big
Blue Button.
It's a methodology for teaching effective virtual classes,
which I will touch upon.
It is the platform, the software itself, that understands the
goals of the educator and student and tries to help you reach
those goals.
It is a deep integration with learning management systems.
The virtual classroom does not occur in isolation.
It occurs in context.
It is a roadmap based on applied pedagogical theory, which I will
touch on as well.
And it's a global community that is accelerating towards that
roadmap.
And these pieces, the caulk today is really on the roadmap,
but they all kind of feed in towards it.
The roadmap is informed and shaped by all five of these areas.
In terms of just platform itself, it's always cool to check out
the Big Blue Button project at GitHub and see just how many
commits there have been.
Over 40,000 commits in the last 14 years.
The project has been forked or copied almost 6,000 times.
And over 8,000 people on GitHub are actively watching the
project.
So these are very strong signs of a healthy, vibrant open
source project.
The last check in here for 2.6 was 14 hours ago.
There are now more people working on Big Blue Button than
ever before.
We've had over 150 people commit to the project.
And that is accelerating.
There is a number of components in our platform.
Big Blue Button is sort of the top, the pyramid.
This is the one we see.
But there are other components that you see in the project.
There's green light, which is a front end.
Scale light is a load balancer.
These have presentations at the World Conference.
A member of our community maintains a Docker version of
Big Blue Button.
There's the installer to help you install.
And there's also an LTI component so that if there isn't
a need of integration for LMS, you can use an LTI
integration.
And it's really good.
And there's going to be another talk on that as well.
In terms of the global community, there are some
large groups behind Big Blue Button.
The French Ministry of Education uses us quite
heavily.
That's for K-12.
France Université Numérique.
The FUN or Higher Ed.
And also ZKI, which is a consortium of German
universities.
All three of these organizations are actively
contributing towards accelerating the improvement
of Big Blue Button along its roadmap.
There's an example from the French government
site.
They use Big Blue Button as the state webinar
system in addition to using it for teaching
and learning.
And in terms of the project, we focused on
distance education.
We are built into the core of Canvas.
We are built into the core of Schoology.
This is not LTI.
This is code in the core.
We're built into the core of Moodle.
We're built into the core of Sakai,
Chameleon, Populi, Genzibar, and others.
And so this reflects that other industry
leading learning management systems have
chosen to build Big Blue Button into the
core of their code base and make it
available by default to their community.
In particular, if you download Moodle, the
core integration, which we worked over 10
years on, is now in the core of Moodle
itself.
There are, in the community, there are a
number of companies that are listed on the
Big Blue Button website that have been
actively contributing to Big Blue Button
over the years.
And any one of those, you can reach out
for help with using Big Blue Button.
You can think of it as commercial open
source.
We treat Big Blue Button like a product,
and we release it like a product.
We also get together for developer summits.
This was in Germany in November.
That was very fun.
And this was the recent one we had in
Brazil, the 17th developer summit over the
time.
And we had a lot of fun there as well,
accelerating.
A lot of the people there, you'll see
them present in the next three days.
Okay, so let me ask a multiple choice
question.
What is Big Blue Button?
You can choose multiple options.
Choose the options you think it applies
to.
This is me engaging the audience,
so make it more active.
I could phrase it as like what you
think is more than not,
but you probably pick up it's a question
that it's actually all of these.
But actually I'm seeing something
interesting in terms of what people
think.
Okay, so it's definitely
a platform.
And it's a methodology.
And it's a deep integration,
which I went through.
And it's the roadmap, sort of our
guide.
And it's the global community.
So it is all five of those.
But it's kind of keen to see which
one people chose.
All right.
So I could just launch in right now
and tell you about all the features
we're working on.
But there's a reason why we're
working on these features.
And I think it's really important to
understand.
Because the roadmap is something we
think a lot about.
And the roadmap is based on what
is the goals we're trying to achieve.
So one
first place to start it is what
is the road we're driving on?
Like what's the world around us
look like for online learning?
And we now live in a world
where virtual classrooms are
mainstream.
Because of COVID, I mean
pretty much every school has done
virtual classes.
But the virtual classes have
changed over the years.
So if you go way back, for those of
you, if you tried to do virtual
classes in 1990s, you probably did
broadcast lecture TV.
In the 2000s, the learning
management system started coming
out and you kind of did things
online.
It wasn't synchronous, but it
wasn't physically attending
classes.
Video conferencing system became
more accessible and prevalent by
2010s.
We had this really strange
time, the emergency remote
teaching in 2020, 2022.
That didn't work out so well.
I'll talk about that in a moment.
And then we believe that the
future of virtual classrooms are
not a video centric, but a
pedagogic centric.
So this was something that came
about recently in the United
States.
They called it a nation's
report card.
And they looked at how the
test scores were done from kids
compared to 2020 and 2023 in
mathematics and reading.
And across the board, the
scores were down.
It really, students took, it
was very difficult during
COVID.
And that is telling us a lot of
things about what was virtual
classrooms online and what they
need to be.
So it really boils down to
this diagram.
The underlying problem with
COVID and a lot of virtual
classrooms, if you're looking
for the optimal results, well,
you're using a video
conferencing system.
And the goal of the video
conferencing system is to
meet.
But in a virtual classroom, the
goal is not to meet.
It is to learn.
In a virtual classroom, you
have the educator, the
teacher, the instructor, the
professor.
They have degrees.
And they are, they have gone
to training to teach online.
So the requirements for what
they do is much more than
the meeting.
And I kind of think of the
analogy like this.
If you are thinking about
biking, if you are to meet,
you are using like a road
bike.
It will get you from point A
to point B.
But if you're teaching classes,
there are things that you
need to do that you need to
do differently than a virtual
video conferencing system.
And so if you're going off
road with a bike, you would
not choose a road bike.
You would choose a bike that
understands this is what I
need to do off road.
Suspension, design, like
more gears and so on.
So this, a lot of teachers
struggled during COVID.
A lot of students struggled
because the platform they did
didn't really encompass.
When you share your audio
video on your screen, the
platform has no idea what
you're trying to do.
It's just sharing media.
Everything else is on you,
the teacher and the student.
And that's challenging.
So if we want to figure out
like how do we measure
success of this, really it's
measurable learning outcomes.
That's what that nation
report card showed.
And so if you think about
the educator's point of view,
what's the challenges?
You've got two choices.
You work within the limits
of the video conferencing
system.
I will share my screen
and I hope you guys
follow me along.
Or you attempt to augment
those limits with third party
tools.
I'm going to need you to
log into this website
and this other website
because we're just going to
try to get some engagement
going here so that
foster learning.
Neither of these are great
choices.
And the student challenges
as well, like building
relationships that foster
learning.
You have an unstructured
environment.
You largely doing passive
learning.
And look, I think it's
worthwhile just
acknowledging it's really
hard to keep focused,
especially in a work
dominated by social media
that's optimized for your
attention, not for learning.
Facebook does not care
if you learn.
It just wants you to
stay on Facebook
and pick any other
social media.
So this challenge of
learning is compounded
by there's just a lot
of things vying for
students' time.
OK, so I'm going to
turn it around and I'm
going to ask you guys
a question.
Imagine you're designing
a world class online
school.
OK.
And how would you ensure
that the classes,
the virtual classes
in that school are going
to be effective?
Give me one thing that
you would do to ensure
that the virtual classes
are going to be effective.
But I'm looking for a
couple of responses
in the chat.
And again, this is me.
I'd like to get your
thoughts before I go
on to the next step
in terms of like how we
think about effective
virtual classes and how
that guides our roadmap.
OK.
Highly interactive.
Ask questions.
Evaluate learning
results.
Engagement.
Webcams, which are good
for building relationships.
User engagement.
Interactive.
I'm going to linger on
this for a moment,
like at least a minute.
So take a moment.
Put your thoughts into
the discussion.
Engage students with
interactive sessions.
Reverse or rich portfolio
methods allow teachers
to connect to all
participants.
More student talk time.
Good.
Active discussions.
Yes.
So it's complex, right?
There's a lot of things
that have to go on
in a class.
And there's a lot of
complex things that have
to go on when you
teach and learn.
So an effective
virtual classroom is
not just having a
teacher talk for 60
minutes and the
students learn.
It's tantamount to
just watching the
recording.
It's passive learning.
It's just not work.
If that worked,
the test scores for
the nation's report card
United States would
have been different,
but they're not.
And so if we do
the same things in
the future, we may
not really expect to
have much of a
difference.
And Big Blue Button,
we want to make
a difference.
We really want the
teaching and learning
occurring online to
be quality education.
So if we think
about this,
I mean, there's
really two people in
our virtual class.
There's the educator
and the student.
I use educators,
teachers, students,
teachers,
professors,
instructors,
and so on.
And really,
their goals are to
teach and the
educators to teach
and the students to
learn.
So we don't have
to imagine what
that means.
There's 50 years
and more of
pedagogy that's
looking at what
are the practices
of effective
teaching and learning.
So in designing
a more effective
virtual classroom
or providing
one for the world,
we're not trying
to create new ideas.
We're really trying
to understand
what is the theory,
the pedagogical
theory behind it.
And I plucked out
two definitions of
pedagogy,
the science of
education or the
study of knowledge
and how skills
are used in
educational context.
The goal of
a virtual classroom
is not to meet,
it is to learn.
And I like the
second one.
The ultimate goal
of pedagogy is
to foster effective
learning to help
students become
independent and
lifelong learnings.
And that goes back
to, I think,
to the UNESCO.
We need
educated,
skeptical,
curious,
critical learners
in the world
to help
improve the
world for everybody,
make the world
a better place.
So we measure in
terms of learning
outcomes.
Well, it's
a good question to ask
and I'm going to
talk about pedagogy
for a moment
because it does
underpin what we do.
What does it
mean to learn?
Well, okay.
Our brains are
not computers.
Like, if they were,
you could watch
three hours of
YouTube videos
on basic Spanish
and walk out
and start speaking
basic Spanish.
They're not.
They're made up
of 850 billion
neurons,
which are
connected
to
axioms
hooked on
by synapses.
And it's
this huge,
huge neural
network in
our brain.
And there's
actually a
whole science
around educational
neuroscience
that looks at
our brain
and what happens
when we learn.
A few things,
like there's a
concept of
neuroplasticity,
which allows us
to adapt
and learn new
things.
Long-term
potentiation,
which basically
and then there's
chemical changes,
such as increased
neurotransmitters,
neuromodulators
that occur
during learning
and increased
synaptic strength.
Okay.
So this was not meant
to be a course
in brain science,
but what I hope
you get out of this
is that we're
not computers
and our brains
are biological.
And there's a
good analogy
where learning
is like a physical
workout.
It's not perfect,
but it's actually
really good.
You know,
if you say,
you can't walk
into a gym
and watch videos
on working out.
You actually have to
pick up the weights
and work out.
Your body,
your muscles respond.
With learning,
you can't passively
watch something
and expect to learn.
The analogy
I always think about is,
think of a time
you've gone to a movie,
you watched two hours
of the movie,
you went out with friends
and then you wanted
to tell your friend,
hey, I thought the,
the daughter
of the main character
was really good,
but you can't remember
her name.
Right?
Learning takes effort
and effort is good.
It's how our brain learns.
So this leads us
into a certain direction
for what is an effective
virtual classroom.
And that means like,
what does it mean
to learn effectively
and how can we do this?
Okay.
So I'm going to bring up
another question.
So what is this diagram?
Can anyone tell me
what this diagram is?
It's very famous
in pedagogy.
Okay.
Yes.
Yes.
I see the responses coming in.
This is really positive.
Okay.
Very good.
All the different responses.
Okay.
So,
this is Bloom's taxonomy
and it is a theory of learning.
It's not the theory of learning.
And again,
there's a lot of simplification
going on here
because there's many ways
of looking at it.
But look,
this actually says
a few important things.
This is like 50 years.
We can remember
and understand things.
And then to get to
the ability to create,
which is mastery,
you got to go through
the ability to apply
what you're doing,
assess it,
and evaluate it.
And we call this
the apply zone.
You cannot get to mastery
unless you start
applying what you're doing.
Your muscles won't grow
unless you pick up a weight.
Your brain doesn't learn
unless you do things.
And you can think of
learning workouts.
If you're climbing Bloom's staircase,
you're going to do it
over successive study periods,
virtual classes,
workouts,
call it learning workouts.
And over time,
you start to master the skill.
You start to understand.
You start to be able to apply it,
like working out.
So,
I'm going to switch over to
what we believe is the structure
of a successful virtual class.
And again,
it's another component
of the roadmap.
So, we believe
this is based on
a lot of interaction
with teachers
that people teach online effectively.
There's always some part
of the beginning of the class
to strengthen relationships.
In a virtual class,
you're kind of like
looking through a keyhole,
trying to see
what other people are doing.
You really have to be overt.
You have to set a time aside
to allow students and teachers
to form bonds,
build relationships,
so that they feel comfortable
engaging themselves,
struggling,
making mistakes.
And then the rest is
kind of more straightforward,
but you can see the bulk of this
is not webcams.
It's more learning and applying.
So, you would review as a teacher,
make sure the foundations
you're building on are strong.
There'd be some preview.
There'd be the main segments
we'll talk about.
There'd be a review of the class,
and ideally you get
the students to review.
Again, forcing recall.
And you talk about next steps.
And maybe using the last five minutes
to get them working
on the next assignment.
Again, more apply.
Within the main segment,
you have topics.
You break them up,
and our brains can focus
for maybe 8, 12 minutes
before we start to wander
without doing anything.
So, what you're really doing
is trying to set up small chunks
and create the scaffolding
on which you can get students
to start applying themselves.
And this gets back to
the applied learning,
the active learning.
Each one of these gray areas,
you can think of applied
learning and assessment.
Students are doing something.
You, as the instructor,
are assessing and giving feedback.
The platform should understand this
and help you do it.
So, we have this guiding principle
we think about as like
the virtuous cycle
of applied learning.
So, if you have an activity,
you essentially want students
to apply themselves,
put forward some effort, right?
This isn't passive.
Give feedback to the ones
that are struggling,
and the students will learn.
The cycle you're trying to get
is that students realize
the more I apply myself,
the faster I learn.
This is how you have
a more effective use of your time.
Coming to a class
and applying yourself
is going to yield
a much better outcome
for reaching your goal
as a student to learn
than it is passively watching.
You're just going to spend
more time and learn less.
So, spend less time
and do more,
and you'll learn more.
Well, you might ask,
well, what's the optimal
effort for learning?
Well, it turns out,
there's a theory for that too.
This is the zone
of proximal development
by Yavovsky.
And it basically says, you know,
if you try to do something
that's too easy,
you're not really
thinking about it.
If you try something
that's too hard,
it's not going to be
very satisfying
because you won't
gain any understanding.
But what's really interesting
is in this zone
of proximal development,
I call it the learning zone,
at the bottom end,
it's what you can learn
on your own.
But at the top end,
the optimal end,
is what you can optimally learn
with help from others,
whether it's peers,
whether it's teachers,
and they like social
constructivism is here as well.
So really, the optimal learning
is doing things with help,
doing things with feedback.
That's what the theory
of pedagogy says.
And of course,
it brings true, right?
But it's not like it's,
it's what, it's what
it's how our brains work.
Okay.
So really, this cycle
of applied learning
is really getting students
to do things
that are in that zone,
ideally near the
right-hand part of it.
They struggle,
you as the instructor,
see them and give feedback,
or maybe they're in
breakout rooms,
and they have this cycle
that starts up
over and over again.
The platform should
understand this
and support the
teacher and student
in doing it.
So this comes back
to the how.
This is kind of
our North Star
for the roadmap.
In the Big Blue Button project,
when we look at things
that we are building
out in the product,
we come back
and ask ourselves,
is this helping
to maximize the time?
So we're saving
the instructor time.
We're making things
more efficient
for the students
to apply themselves,
applied learning,
and have opportunities
to get feedback.
The more we can do this,
the more effective
the virtual class
is going to be,
the more you'll see
learning outcomes,
and the more you'll
end up as a result
of students and teachers
reaching their goals.
So this is our North Star,
and it's from this
that I'm going to transition
to the roadmap.
But we'll do something
fun first.
So which of these
is not a learning theory
on which we have built upon?
Okay.
It's looking good.
I think everybody
pretty much got
that we did not build upon
the theory of passive learning.
That's not part of what we want.
We want to do things
that avoid the problems
of what you see
in video conferencing systems,
but also have a theory
of the case,
have a guiding principle
to say, well,
what is we should do?
It's not sufficient
to just not do
what others do.
We've got to really understand
what it is we want to do
and what is guiding us
towards it.
Okay.
So I want to come up
with a few things today.
I'll take that diagram,
the virtual cycle
of applied learning,
how Big Blue Button
starts to fit in.
So the things that you see
in Big Blue Button,
the breakout rooms,
the multi-user whiteboard,
the smart slides,
all of these have been designed
to make it easy
for the instructor
to create space
to have students apply.
You don't have to go
to a third party product.
It's built in.
And when you use
these built-in capabilities,
what we're doing is
we're generating analytics.
And these analytics
are visible to you,
the instructor,
teacher, educator,
as the learning analytics dashboard.
The way we say it is
that there is no back
of the classroom.
You are not dependent
upon webcams
to understand
if a student is struggling
or not.
You have them do activities
in Big Blue Button
and will tell you
what's the results
of those activities,
the analytics,
and those analytics
are a first-order approximation
if the students
are struggling or not.
Certainly, if they're not
responding to polls
or if they're responding
incorrectly
or they're not participating,
that's a warning sign
that they may not be learning.
So we try to help
the instructor in this.
And I'll give you
a couple of visuals.
And for those of you
that are familiar
with Big Blue Button,
this is what we do today.
I've been doing this
for a while
in this presentation now.
I've been turning on
multi-user whiteboard.
And when I do this,
we can all move
the mouse around.
It's a form
of visual assessment.
This is what we did
at the beginning
to see which parts
of the world we live in.
And I can also turn it off as well.
I can also do
where I can lock
so that other users
can't see the cursor.
So if I turn on
the cursors again,
can I ask everybody
to point to the button
that's turned on
multi-user whiteboard?
You can't see
where everyone else
is pointing to,
but I visually can see
if everybody is pointing
at the right place.
Again, as the instructor,
it's another very powerful way
to assess if students
are learning.
We built that in
directly based on
feedback from educators.
Breakout rooms are there
where we can create content now
and bring them back
to the main room.
Really effective.
So you not only put students
in breakout rooms
to learn from each other
and apply themselves,
social constructivism,
but you get them
to come back
and present as well.
And the big blue button
will bring the content
back for you.
The learning analytics dashboard
is a live dashboard
that you can open up
in another tab,
another browser tab,
and it will keep track
of who is in the class
so you don't have to wonder
OK, I see there are 50 students
in the class.
Are there anybody here
who just kind of slipped in
one minute ago
to try to get a credit?
You can see.
It will tell you how long
each student has been there.
It will also tell you
some of the activities
like talk time, webcam time,
and some of the activities
they do in the session.
You can actually get
a timeline view
so if there was
a particular slide
that students raised their hand,
you don't have to remember it.
The big blue button knows it.
It will tell you.
Again, trying to offload
some cognitive load
off the table
Again, trying to offload
some cognitive load
off the teacher
because big blue button
is really trying to understand
and help what you're trying to do.
And the other is the polls.
So the polls give you
a sense of formative assessment
and big blue button
will keep track
of all the poll answers
for you during the session.
You don't have to remember
if you have some polls
that you've done.
You can always refer back
and see what the results are.
And obviously if you
organize it by the responses,
if you see students
who are not responding,
again it's an indication
that they may be struggling
reaching out to them for a moment,
giving a little bit of feedback,
tells the student
the teacher is aware of me
and cares about me,
which probably was really hard
to do in COVID
when you just had webcams
to rely on
and students largely
didn't share their webcams.
Teachers teaching the screen,
hoping that students learn.
We don't want to do that.
We want you to be able
to teach students directly,
get them to apply
and give feedback in the moment.
Okay, so a lot of sort of scaffolding
and framework that I've laid
in terms of how we're thinking
about the future
and what guides us.
So let me talk about
some upcoming roadmap.
So we have two releases
of Big Blue Button coming up
and the 2.7 and the 2.8.
What we did in the 2.6 release,
we built in TL Draw,
the whiteboard,
which you've been using here.
It's fantastic.
But it took us quite a good chunk
of time to do it.
But we were invested in doing it
because we believed
we could build a world-class
whiteboard in the Big Blue Button.
We opened up new avenues
to use for more engagement
and more feedback.
So what we're shifting to
is trying to do smaller releases
that iterate more quickly.
So you'll see 2.6 came out in April.
We're gunning to have 2.7
working towards getting out in August
and 2.8 in December.
Again, if something doesn't need a release,
it can always go to the next release.
They're not long apart.
But we think our community
is going to be served by
smaller, more frequent releases
than longer releases
like every year long.
All right.
For 2.7, there are a couple of things
that we do to maximize the time,
help the instructor,
and to give feedback.
So you'll see a grid layout.
This makes it easy for you
to put students into a grid format.
It's very familiar.
You can see them all into one area.
This is usually a good point
at the beginning of the session
when you're building up
the relationships.
Timer, stopwatch,
assign the web cams
to the presentation area.
If you have a hybrid class
and you have high definition web cam,
and a much requested feature
is the reactions.
So grid mode will look like this.
You cannot share any web cam.
There will be an avatar.
And you can see who's muted and unmuted.
Very familiar layout.
There will be a timer.
There's now a timer and stopwatch.
So you can,
if you want to have an activity
during the live class,
you can set a time for it.
Either stopwatch to count up
or timer to count down.
And the reaction bar.
So this is what the reaction bar
currently looks like.
And you'll be able to have students,
the thinking is that
will you be able to tell students,
okay, turn on your reaction bar.
And this will be visible.
And as you give your session,
students can just click at any point.
And you will already see this
in the alpha in 2.7,
which the beta is coming out shortly.
Again, we want to get it out in August.
And we will be building on top of this.
But we want to make it
very visual for students.
They're looking ahead to the December release.
A lot of it is going to be on the whiteboard.
We are incorporating TLDRAW 2.0
into BigBlueButton.
And that's going to make it possible
for us to do something
we call infinite whiteboard.
Where there will be another mode
on the presentation mode.
So you can upload slides.
You can share.
You can put a webcam at the presentation.
You can share a video.
You can use it for shared notes.
Or you could have an infinite whiteboard.
And again, TLDRAW 2.0.
Awesome project.
Steve Roots, the founder of TLDRAW,
will be speaking tomorrow
and talking about his roadmap
for TLDRAW 2.0 and beyond.
But think of it this way.
Because we built TLDRAW
into the core of BigBlueButton,
we get the benefit from all the work
that the project does
to improve whiteboards.
So we free up our time
to work on other areas.
But we build on top of them,
leverage what Steve and his project has done.
And the visual here.
This is an early build of TLDRAW 2.0.
This concept where you have
more in the infinite whiteboard.
You can see where you are moving around.
But it's optimized even more.
And it lays the groundwork
for the infinite whiteboard
and whiteboard vision,
of which there is a presentation
on this as well.
It's really amazing, guys.
I'm so happy we did all the work
for the whiteboard.
It just means that BigBlueButton
has a world-class whiteboard
that is just going to keep getting
better and better.
And just as other people leverage us,
just as other people leverage us
as open source, we're leveraging TLDRAW.
There are some under-the-hood things
that are going on for 2.8.
All of which are really important.
We have a goal to scale
BigBlueButton to 1,000 users.
And to do that, we have to refactor
how the client and the servers
talk with each other
and make it a lot more efficient.
And we know how to do this.
We've been working on this for months.
So there are two presentations
about GraphQL.
And this is going to really optimize
how the communication goes back and forth
between the client and the server
in terms of reducing the traffic.
And it simplifies the implementation
of the communication as well.
There is also work underway
to do a plugin architecture.
I encourage you to go to that talk.
This is how other projects
have gone to the next level,
which is to get to a point
where they're a platform,
of which we are.
But then they make it so possible
for people to put their own modules
into the platform, their own plugins.
This is what Moodle has built on
for 20 years.
So we're working to do this
in Big Blue Button,
which means we'll provide the platform.
And if there's something that people want to do
that isn't done today,
they can do it.
Think of this as a first release,
but man, it's a huge milestone for the project.
XAPI, the Experience API,
to integrate with other learning record stores
will come in December.
And we're also going to do it
for those geeks out there.
We're moving to 22.04.
And for what it's worth,
the XAPI support,
this has been working
with the French Ministry of Education.
They've already defined the actors,
and we've already done a prototype of this,
and work is underway to get it into 2.8.
And it's been, it's supported
by as well, by FunMOOG.
So it's really awesome.
And it's going to basically, you know,
integrate with other learning,
other learning record stores
for sharing data.
Okay, so that's 2.7,
which is coming out in August.
2.8, which we're working to get out in December.
And the features that we're doing that
in terms of maximizing time for applied learning
and feedback and under the hood.
There are things ahead that we want to do.
So a lot of this is laying groundwork
to make us do some of these things ahead.
So there are many things that we want to work on.
If you look at each release that we do in Bigwood Button,
there are usually hundreds,
if not thousands of pull requests go in.
But I'm going to highlight some of the high-level ones
we want to do.
We want to bring analytics in from the LMS.
The LMS knows about the student.
We want to bring some information in
to help the teacher maybe understand
if there are students that are doing really well
or students that are doing struggling.
Like at the beginning of the class,
the teacher could manually go find this information in the LMS.
It seems like we can leverage these deep integrations
and do better.
We want to use AI to help the teacher
do more formative assessment.
I have some screenshots of it.
Hybrid classrooms is another one,
which maybe you have students physical in the class
and remote.
This will be touched upon in the UI presentation later today
by Bruno and by Tyler.
Pizzing, which would be really good
because it's another way of doing formative assessment,
polling with the correct answer.
Whiteboard vision, breakout vision,
and something we call cone of silence.
I'll talk about all of them in the next few moments.
Okay, so breakout vision is what it sort of sounds like.
Breakout rooms are a super effective way
to get students to apply themselves
in social constructivism.
If you have to do something,
construct something with knowledge,
your learning jumps up.
And if you have to teach somebody else,
like in a breakout room or help them out,
your learning jumps up even higher.
But as an instructor,
you would like to see what's going on in the breakout rooms.
For those of you that use breakout rooms in Big Blue Button,
you'll know that you can open up a breakout room in a new tab.
So you as an instructor could follow, let's say,
four breakout rooms.
And I know of instructors that actually turn on the audio as well.
The way they say it, it's a little hard in the brain,
but they get to hear.
We kind of learn that some of the other video conferencing systems
don't let you see what goes on in the breakout room.
You just let students go and hope it works out.
That's not what you want to do as a teacher, right?
You want to have visibility.
So we want to give you that visibility.
The idea here is imagine you can see the current presentation
of the breakout rooms as it's going.
And then you would see,
hey, this particular breakout room isn't doing anything.
That's probably the one I want to jump into.
The analytics we can express this as imagine the LMS
knows that students have not submitted the last two assignments.
And when the students join the session,
you as the instructor, the educator,
get like a hint that says,
hey, Ricardo is missing two assignments.
And maybe there's even a link back to the LMS
where it gets you a more detailed report
on Ricardo's performance so far in the term.
You don't have to do this.
You could rely on Big Blue Button to just tell you
if the LMS has something that it wants to indicate to you.
And, of course, these are ideas,
but there's lots of rich data there.
Just make it easy for the instructor
to see which students are struggling
or reward which students are doing really well.
Okay, we did a proof of concept with open AIs, APIs.
And we didn't do something where it's like,
let's summarize the session for the students
because if you think about how the brain works,
that's not as effective as getting the students to do something.
But we want to have the teachers save as much time.
So a poll could be typed in.
Now, I've not been typing any polls in
because Big Blue Button is reading the content of the slides
that I have a poll question in.
But what if I upload a slide that just has content?
So let's take this example.
I found a presentation on the Internet on the fall of Rome.
And so here's a slide with content.
And let's say I would like to take a moment
and just see if students are picking up what I'm talking about.
The content is here, but what I would like to do
is create a poll question that maybe has five choices
and one of them is correct.
Pretty hard for the instructor to do this on the fly.
I could do it ahead of time, but the content is all there.
Big Blue Button reads the slides into memory for screen readers,
so we have the text.
And with AI, or a large language model,
we could do something like this.
We could give the instructor a button
where the text for the slide goes back to the language model,
and the prompt is, you are a teacher,
come up with a poll question with five choices,
one of which is correct,
that attests that students have comprehended
with the content in the slide.
So here I come back with a question,
five choices, one of them is correct.
It would take 10 seconds to generate this.
I accept the poll.
It populates the polling questions in Big Blue Button,
so I could adjust them if I want,
or I could just click Start.
And when I do, I switch over here to a student's view,
the dialogue comes up, I am asked a question,
and I have to figure out the response.
And of course, in Big Blue Button,
the responses come in live,
and they are available in the Learning Analytics Dashboard.
So you can use AI to help you as instructors save time
to create more opportunities for formative assessment
so you can give feedback to students that are struggling.
This fits in, right?
This is a good use of AI.
All right.
I want to finish up with whiteboard vision,
which we have talked about in the past,
but it really does pull together
a lot of the core concepts of what we believe
an effective virtual classroom should work towards.
And this is what we've been working towards
in terms of laying the foundations that's going on.
So I want you to imagine your instructor.
You have some tasks.
There's two or three things that you want students to do,
and it's going to involve the whiteboard.
It'll be something visual.
And so I want you to imagine that
you've got three slides set up.
There's three things that you want students to do.
It could be, you know, solve something
and enter their correct answer.
It could be draw something,
but it's going to cause them to apply themselves.
You're going to create space for them to do something
and then assess them.
You're in a class of, let's say, 12 students
or 24 or 48.
How can you see which students are struggling
to give them feedback, right?
Maximize time for applied learning feedback.
Well, if the whiteboard that students are,
if you start the session,
students are now using their whiteboard
and filling in, say, a blank
in terms of what the answer is,
you should be able to see live all the whiteboards.
You should be able to see some indication,
like are students filling in the correct answer,
and they should be ordered in a way that
probably says the person here in the upper left-hand corner
might be struggling.
There's no activity in the whiteboard
or they've been answering questions incorrectly.
So you've got them working
for maybe 8, 10 minutes.
You as instructor now have some golden time
to help students who are struggling.
And maybe you can help three or four of them.
We want to make that easy for you in Big Blue Button.
We'll show you the students are doing,
how they're doing on the activity.
And if you click on one of them,
we want to bring you into like a one-on-one session
where suddenly you're sharing webcams
with the student, audio,
shared whiteboard, and everyone else just fades.
They're just one-on-one time
for a few moments with the student,
and you give them feedback.
And imagine this from the student's point of view.
You know, they know that if they work hard,
if they try to apply themselves,
they may not get it always right,
but they will get feedback.
And that feedback is going to help them
get to that next level of understanding,
the virtuous cycle of applied learning and feedback.
We want to make that possible.
And then we take it further.
Well, after the session's done,
that data shouldn't just disappear.
It can go into the Learning Analytics dashboard,
a live dashboard during the session.
So imagine you see this
and you see visuals of all the whiteboard
or the results the students did.
And imagine that you also get like a bird's eye view
to see how did students do in that activity.
And then this gives you a sense of
the class learning or individual students struggling.
Again, the platform should understand
that the goal of the virtual classroom
is not to meet, it is to learn.
And it should provide the tools built in
without you requiring to do third-party tools
to facilitate the learning.
And the learning is done through
applying yourself and getting feedback.
So that's our mantra.
That's the guide that we have
are using for the world map.
Again, another fun...
So what's the focus of BigBlueButton?
Is it on video conferencing
or is it on virtual classrooms?
It can be used for video conferencing.
Remember the diagram, right?
Virtual classrooms does encompass video.
It's good for relationships.
But the goal of the class
is not to meet, it is to learn.
And yes,
that's what our focus is.
So this is our North Star.
This is what we've done.
Maximize time for applied learning and feedback.
And I think I'll leave
with one last slide.
So we exist because we believe
everyone in the world should have access
to quality education.
What we do is help teachers teach
and learners learn.
And the way we do that is we try to
maximize the time for applied learning
and feedback during the live virtual class.
And that's what we do.
During the live virtual class.
And make it easy for the teacher to teach
and the learner to learn.
And with that,
I have not
looked at the chat, so apologies
if a question went up.
But I will happily answer
questions. And then I
have 12 minutes before the next session starts.
And actually, Aaron, I'm going to ask
if you have it already. So
go to the next session and open up the room
so folks can join.
I'd be
happy to ask.
So Priton, if you
have a self-hosted infrastructure,
please engage with our community.
Join our mailing list. Reach out to any of the companies
that provide commercial support for Big Blue Button.
You can get community support. You can get
commercial support. All of these are
available to you.
Heather, will all the
data from the Learning Analytics Dashboard be available
to statistics after the conference is ended?
That's the recording format that's
available from Blindside Networks. Yes,
it is. So that's
making it, all the data is available
live during the session. We kind of went a step
further to make that data available
to you live after the session's over.
I see some people typing in questions.
I'm just kind of scrolling up.
What data will be able to be rolled up into an admin
dashboard? So, Latia,
I think you'll see that there are companies in the Big Blue Button
ecosystem that are working on building out
an enterprise Learning Analytics
Dashboard so that if you
are Director of Online Learning and you
are wondering what's going on in the online classes
in terms of engagement and maybe looking to correlate
that with great outcomes in the LMS,
we want to make it easy for you to do that.
So, will it be possible in the
future to have an API to get student attendance?
Is that on the roadmap? That data's actually
in Big Blue Button. When a session
is finished, it is stored in the Events
XML. Check out the BBB Events
Gem. You can tease out that data
in terms of who is attending
the class and so again,
the information's there. Think of Big Blue
Button as a platform. Post
the forum if you have any questions about it.
Is there an accredited accepted standard defined
for overtaking analytic data out of
LMS? I think this one is going to be
very contextual.
We were working
to provide this capability that you could take the data
out. It's certainly there in the
platform itself. We expect
others to build upon it and
it will be in the
context. Probably like if you're in Europe,
GDPR, North America,
whether it makes sense to
take the data out or not, we leave
it up. Our goal is to build the platform and to make
these
capabilities
things that others can build upon.
The learning dashboard,
yeah, it's not served through an API.
We don't have one yet
and maybe we should. The API
here, like during the live class,
you can query what's going on
in the Big Blue Button session. But the way
Big Blue Button is designed is there's no
database of like
inside of Big Blue Button. It doesn't know about scheduling.
It doesn't know about reporting. It doesn't know about
things that you plan to do tomorrow.
It's just kind of handling the live session.
It's usually in the context of an LMS.
That's the before and after.
What would probably be better is if the data
from the learning analytics dashboard
could move back into the LMS.
And that's also our goal in terms of
unified reports. The LMS gives
you the asynchronous view of
student participation. And Big Blue
Button gives you the synchronous view.
You should be able to get this data together and create
a unified report. By getting the data
back in the LMS, you'd be able to do that
within the LMS and that's one of our goals.
Rob, Big Blue Button
can be used in a mobile device. You, of course, have
a smaller screen, but Big Blue Button is designed
to be mobile first.
In that regards, it's a responsive application.
If you even took your
Big Blue Button display right now in the browser
and just made it smaller and smaller, you'll see
parts of it start to collapse
where you can still expand.
But it has been designed to be mobile first
up front.
Yeah, tablets
are better. Phones are
small devices, but
Big Blue Button is designed to be used
on a phone or tablet
as well. It's a mobile first application.
It also has a lot of work in
accessibility as well. I didn't put anything in,
but everything we do in each release,
make sure we have the ARIA tags, the tab
order, the color contrast,
and we have an external company
audit Big Blue Button
for each release to make sure that we
are accessible. And I think at this point we're
not going to be able to get the data
from the WK2.0 AA
with some exceptions, but you'll see another audit come out
probably on 2.6. We really care
about accessibility.
Pranam, you can't get the data
.json through an API, but
when the recording is processed,
you can get that. So you may not be
able to get it live, but I think you'll probably
want to do something with it after the session is over.
Avika, yes. Check out
later today from Bruno and Tyler on UI.
Work has been underway to do hybrid classes.
Can upload a presentation be read by screen readers in a conference?
Yes, Heather. Exactly.
If you had a screen reader right now,
if you had jars using NVIDIA,
you'd be able to or your screen reader,
you'd be able to get the text read out as well.
We have an external firm that has people go through it and make
sure that you can read it and it is
accessible and they tell us where it's not accessible,
and we work to make it accessible.
If you're Section 508 or WK 2.0,
you need to have accessible products,
that's really important in the educational context,
and that's what we work on.
These are really good questions.
I should point out that you see me as
the co-founder of Big Blue Button Inc.
I do a lot of talking for these presentations,
but there are a lot of people behind the scenes.
Just check out the check-ins in GitHub.
You'll see all the people that are contributing to it.
Designs of it as well, testing,
check out our mailing list which has
over 4,000 people now in
the Big Blue Button developer mailing list,
giving feedback on each release,
helping us improve the product,
reproducing any issues that
developers can fix things and we can verify it.
There's a lot of work that goes on in Big Blue Button.
One more minute, and then I will thank everybody.
You can move on the next session which I encourage you all to
come which is talking about AI and education,
practical uses of AI and education.
We're going to help weave through some of
the hype around it.
Yeah, zoom in and zoom out is there.
You can bring focus to particular sessions.
In Big Blue Button, you never have to ask the students,
can you see what I'm looking at?
We faithfully show you exactly what the teacher
sees or what you're seeing so that you can
focus and bring focus to particular parts.
Check out the tutorial videos,
it actually shows you how to do this.
But I have a mouse wheel here,
I'm just scrolling up and down.
All right, everybody, I'm going to stop recording.
Thank you for attending.
This was a great keynote and I
appreciate all the feedback that you gave.