Graciously hosted by the University of Vienna, over 20 core developers from countries such as Brazil, Canada, Germany, and Austria converged to advance the BigBlueButton project.

BigBlueButton began in 2007 at Carleton University in Canada with an ambitious goal: to build the world’s most effective virtual classroom measured in learning outcomes. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, BigBlueButton’s usage exploded across the world. It became a core part of national and institutional infrastructure, including widespread use by German universities, the French government, and resulted in deep integrations with the world’s two most widely used learning management systems: Canvas and Moodle.

BigBlueButton is now the default virtual classroom for a significant portion of the world’s educational ecosystem.

Since those early days, BigBlueButton has continued to evolve. Its core capabilities now rival those of proprietary video-conferencing platforms, expanding adoption beyond education into corporate and government environments. With the release of BigBlueButton 3.0, a new plug-in architecture transforms BigBlueButton from a product to a platform (which we build upon during this developer summit).

BigBlueButton Developer Summit #22

We focused on three themes for this conference: Improving Learning, Improving Collaboration, and Improving the Core. Whether you’re interested in pedagogy, infrastructure optimization, or plugin development, there’s a session for you.

Theme: Improving Collaboration

As BigBlueButton’s use expands outside the classroom, we want to improve the capabilities for facilitating collaboration.  Fewer mouse clicks, more time collaborating.

• Smart Layout: Ramón Souza explored having BigBlueButton automatically update the layout for students when the teacher shows/hides the presentation area.
• Reducing time to try BigBlueButton: Ahmad Faraht explored modifying GreenLight to allow users to join without logging in, paired with a Google Calendar plugin for scheduling.
• Persistent Sessions: Daniel Schreiber prototyped enabling the shared notes to persist across sessions.
• Multiple Screen sharing: Tainan Felipe explored enabling multiple students to share their screen, including giving the moderator the ability to “peek” at the screen shares without shifting their focus on the presentation.

Theme: Improving the Core

As BigBlueButton becomes more of a platform, we want the core to be solid.  

• Optimizing communication: Gustavo Trott did a deep dive into investigating some slowness of the client and how it relates to HTTP1/1.1 and HTTP/2.0 settings on the BigBlueButton server.
• Reducing memory footprint: Tiago Jacobs rebuilt Hasura from source to better instrument it and investigate why it was holding onto memory under particular circumstances.
• Audio Improvements: Klaus Scheuermann, an audio engineer, worked on creating a web-assembly component that builds upon a WASM module from the popular RNNoise project. The result was some great improvements for background noise removal and auto leveling.
• Arm support: Timo Nogueira Brockmeyer and Samuel Weirich took on the challenge of getting a dockerized version of BigBlueButton running on an ARM-based Mac. They succeeded, leading to a very satisfying moment where they showed a live demo at the end of their presentation.

It was another successful summit! Many of us were impressed with how far we were able to progress in a week of intense effort. We learned a lot, advanced the project, and had some really good meals together.

We invite you to watch any presentations from the 22nd BigBlueButton Developer Summit which will shape BigBlueButton’s next release.

View the full playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uofPdF73k8w&list=PLeSl48Y1rgh8szSJOUcAhOetpNYQZdwHx

Commercial Support

BigBlueButton remains fully open source and is the default virtual classroom for Moodle and Canvas.

BigBlueButton is a platform you can install locally with commercial support. This option makes it especially compelling for organizations that prioritize data privacy, regulatory compliance, and digital sovereignty.

If you’re looking for SaaS hosting of BigBlueButton and commercial support, check out the companies at: https://bigbluebutton.org/hosting/

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With 19 presentations given, BigBlueButton World 2025 is a wrap!

This was our fifth year of conference which attracted nearly 600 participants to watch and give feedback to developers, administrators, and educators who shared their experiences building, supporting, and teaching with BigBlueButton.

The pace of innovation and adoption of BigBlueButton is accelerating, especially due to the recent BigBlueButton 3.0 release which added a new plug-in architecture that enables developers to extend BigBlueButton without modifying the core.

For technical presentations, highlights included:

• Steve Ruiz, founder of tldraw, share the upcoming improvements in their excellent whiteboard,
• Samuel Weirich gave an overview of live streaming BigBlueButton sessions to handle very large audiences,
• Tiago Jacobs and Guilherme Pereira Leme expanded on the latest developments in BigBlueButton’s plugin architecture, and 
• Bruno Guilherme Valentini and Lucas Zawacki looked ahead at the new user experience in the next version of BigBlueButton.  

For educational presentations, highlights included:

• Jack Child shared how Minverva Virtual Academy is using BigBlueButton to provide award winning on-line education,
• Cynthia Gonzalez Lopez shared how School on Wheels uses BigBlueButton to connect children with no fixed address in Southern California with tutors,
• Paul Chillingworth shared how Mathematics in Education and Industry, a UK-based not-for-profit, uses BigBlueButton to teach mathematics online, and
• Dr. Laurie Jones Curtis shared key learnings from her over 40 years experience teaching in the physical and virtual classes.  

Here are all the presentations from the sessions:

The full playlist is available here.

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The BigBlueButton team – represented by Blindside Networks, iMDT, and Mconf – participated in Paris HackDays, an open invitation by Direction Interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM), the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs within the French government.

Today, DINUM offers La Suite, an integrated suite of open source tools that help governments be more efficient and work towards achieving digital sovereignty. One of these tools is docs, a Notion-like clone that recently reached number one on Hacker News.

The HackDays was an invitation for open source projects to come together and improve these tools for the French Government, and by extension, all European countries.

BigBlueButton has a special place within the French Government as the official State Webinar system.  

We of course attended!

Picture of the BigBlueButton team with Stéphanie Schaer, Directrice interministérielle du numérique (yellow lanyard).  Left to right, the BigBlueButton team members were Tiago Jacobs (iMDT), Lucas Zawacki (Mconf), Julia Rathke (Mconf), Guilherme Leme (iMDT), Gustavo Trott (iMDT), and Fred Dixon (Blindside Networks).

The Problem

For every webinar meeting within the French Government, the problem is capturing, summarizing, and re-using this content from the session.

Common questions include

• Where can I find the attendance list and voting results?
• What were the key outcomes?
• What are the next steps?

As meetings are recorded, the organizer could manually extract the audio, run it through speech-to-text, and use the text with AI to summarize the meeting minutes into a shared document (or email out) for further collaboration, perhaps to better prepare for the next meeting.

We thought we could do better.

The Solution

Our idea was to embed docs into BigBlueButton and use AI to summarize the meetings.  

First, we broke the problem down into four steps

1. We extended the BigBlueButton API so it would also create a new docs document for each meetingID. Since docs doesn’t provide such an API, we used playwright to login to docs, create a new document, and return the URL. That was definitely a hack, but it worked!
2. We embedded docs both in a panel and main area in BigBlueButton 3.0 (more on that below).
3. We created a new recording format called transcript that both called Albert, DINUM’s internal AI to do speech-to-text and create a summary of the meeting (key points and action items).
4. We appended this to the corresponding docs document

Here’s the result in a 1:30 minute video we did for the final pitch on Day 3.

We placed in the top 10!

From a field of 300 developers, there were 53 projects submitted for judging in the competition.  

We made the cutoff for the top 10 and presented on Day 3 to the jury of representatives from Germany, France, and the Netherlands. 

While we ultimately didn’t place in the top 3, everyone was impressed with our accomplishments.

“The quality of submissions for the first annual Paris HackDays was amazing. The French Government has been building out a suite of open source applications, called La Suite, to make collaboration more efficient and strengthen digital sovereignty. Today, we use BigBlueButton as our state webinar system and recently created La Suite Docs, a notion-like product for simple, secure, and effective note taking and collaboration,” says Samuel Paccoud, Chef de Pôle Suite Numérique.

“At Paris HackDays, the BigBlueButton team demonstrated a seamless integration of Docs into BigBlueButton, as well as an AI generated summary of the meeting automatically uploaded to Docs, for increasing the efficiency of collaboration of every webinar within the government.”

Embedding docs into BigBlueButton

How were we able to achieve this integration in two days?  (Actually, the days were from 9:00 am to 11:30 PM, so it felt more like four days :-).

It was possible because of BigBlueButton 3.0 and its new plug-in architecture. We created a plugin that embedded docs, via an iFrame, into either the left panel or the main presentation area.

This project enabled us to showcase the ability for BigBlueButton 3.0 to move from an application to a platform.

Like Moodle, developers can extend BigBlueButton 3.0 with their own plugins.  This brings modularity to BigBlueButton where it can be extended and enhanced without modifying the core product.

This also accelerates innovation as both plugins and the core can develop in parallel.

Creating the AI Summary

BigBlueButton already has a modular recording processing system that supports the creation of multiple recording formats.

For the Paris HackDays, we created a new recording format called transcript.

When transcript processes the captured data from the webinar, it calls Albert, DINUM’s internal LLM, twice.  The first time to do a speech-to-text of the meeting.  The second time to summarize that text into key points and action items from the meeting.

As a new recording format, it would also automatically appear to users within B3Desk, the open source front-end that DINUM provides to all government employees.

Here is a mockup of how the Docs link would appear in B3Desk, ready for the organizer to access the AI generated summary for further collaboration and subsequent meetings.

For more information

The purpose of our attending Paris HackDays was to support how the open source community can help Europe accelerate towards digital sovereignty.

We believe the integration with docs would make the French government more efficient as well (they held over 151k sessions in the last 12 months).

Interested in learning more?  Contact us at commercial support to learn more about how BigBlueButton could benefit your government or organization.  

We are ready to help.

(Or invite us to your hack days and we may just show up :-).

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Today, BigBlueButton has 

• 150+  developers who have contributed 5 or more merged pull requests, and
• are localized into over 65 languages, and 
• Major learning management systems, including Moodle, Instructure (Canvas), PowerSchool (Schoology), and Jenzabar (eLearning) have embedded it into their core products. Together, these integrations cover more than 75% of the world’s learning management systems for K-12 and higher education.

The project recently completed two BigBlueButton Developer Summits, Dev20 in Berlin, Germany (Dec 2024) and Dev21 in Porto Alegre, Brazil (April, 2025), bringing together the global BigBlueButton community to accelerate development.

Below are the four key themes from the past two developer summits that give insight into our path towards building the world’s most effective virtual classroom.

1. Transformation from Product to Platform

“The addition of plugins moves BigBlueButton from a product to a platform, and when you think of a platform, you want a solid foundation that is modular and extensible.”
– Fred Dixon, Keynote for Dev20

A central and foundational theme is the significant shift of the BigBlueButton project from primarily a virtual classroom product to a more versatile and extensible platform.

The latest version of BigBlueButton 3.0, released on February 28, 2025, now includes a plugin architecture designed to lower the barriers for developers, companies, and the global community to extend BigBlueButton’s functionality without modifying the core (see new plugin SDK).

For example, BigBlueButton 2.7 had built-in transcription based on the live captions.  In 3.0, this is now a plugin that enables the project to quickly and easily provide the expected functionality (such as downloads) of a live transcription.

2. Significant Under-the-Hood Overhaul for Performance and Scalability

“You can see the number of users increasing to 700” – Daniel Schrieber, Stress Testing BigBlueButton

We made some big investments in the core of BigBlueButton. The first was rewriting the client-server integration and replacing older components (MongoDB and Meteor) with Hasura and Postgress (using GraphQL) for improved scalability. The second was improving the audio and video quality, especially for lower bandwidth connections, by moving away from FreeSWITCH and MediaSoup towards LiveKit.

3. Redesign of the User Experience (UI/UX)

“A lot of the updates that we’ve done so far have been through the findings that we received from the user experience studies” – Júlia Rathke and Tyler Copeland, New UI Improvements and Refinements

A multi-year effort continues to completely redesign the BigBlueButton interface, informed by extensive research and user testing. This aims for a more modern, intuitive, and consistent user experience. The results of this will be visible in BigBlueButton 3.1, which had its first beta in April 2025.

You may see us make a big splash about the upcoming release of 3.1 later this year with the tagline “Welcome to the post-Covid19 BigBlueButton.”

4. Deep Commitment to Active Learning and Pedagogical Tools

“So now if the teacher wants to make any corrections, they can just put a check mark [next to the student’s whiteboard] and it becomes a two-way collaboration between the teacher and that student.” – Kert Browne, Whiteboard Vision

The project remains fundamentally focused on promoting active learning and feedback to increase learning outcomes, distinguishing it from passive video conferencing tools (passive learning has very poor learning outcomes compared to active learning).

BigBlueButton offers built-in tools for active learning (like whiteboards, polling, breakout rooms) and live analytics (via the Learning Analytics Dashboard) to ensure every student learns.

One project within BigBlueButton we continue to advance towards is “Whiteboard Vision,” the ability for the educator to give each learner their own whiteboard, along with a birds-eye view to see who may be struggling and give them feedback when it matters most: in the moment.

Playlists for Dev20 and Dev21

To check out more videos from the summits, here are the playlists for both summits.

21st BigBlueButton Developer Summit (14 videos)

20th BigBlueButton Developer Summit (6 videos)

The post Inside BigBlueButton’s Evolution: Developer Summit Highlights & What’s New in 3.0+ appeared first on BigBlueButton - Open Source Web Conferencing.

This release introduces five new capabilities:

• Threaded Replies: Anyone can reply to a message, which increases the engagement of chat. 

• Edit and Delete Messages: All users can now edit or delete their own chat messages.  Educators can delete any message, allowing for more precise moderation without clearing the entire chat history.

• Emoji Reactions: All users can add emoji reactions, providing immediate feedback and engagement signals.

2. New display of poll results as graphs

3. New whiteboard shapes and highlight tool

New shapes, checkboxes, and a highlight tool allow you to better annotate and emphasize content in your slides.

4. New buttons: Raise hand and leave

It should be easy to do common tasks – so now Raise Hand and Leave have their own buttons.

5. Session information moved to the top

We’ve moved the welcome messages to the top so they don’t scroll away in the chat.  Want to see details about the meeting (such as invite URLs if provided by the front-end), they are only a click aways.

Overview video

To get a 5m overview of these new features, check out this video:

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Success Story:

Activate Learning Empowers Learners with BigBlueButton

Activate Learning is a progressive and global education group, committed to transforming lives through an innovative approach based on three key elements: a deep understanding of neuroscience and how the brain learns, a methodology of continually fostering positive emotions around learning itself, and a delivery method that emphasizes relevance and impact of newly learned skills to increase students motivation. It’s a holistic approach that separates Activate Learning from other  education providers.

Activate Learning provides 14-16, further, and higher education, adult, apprenticeships, and business training to learners within the UK. One of the challenges that Activate Learning faces is delivery of courses to a very diverse community that spans the length and breadth of the UK. Another challenge is the need to up-skill their staff frequently, ensuring they are up-to-date with their digital and pedagogic skills to teach learners.

How BigBlueButton helps overcome these challenges

The use of BigBlueButton and Canvas has been integral to Activate Learning’s success and solving these challenges. The wide range of Activate Learning courses and national reach is made possible through combining BigBlueButton and Canvas LMS for their online platform, Activate Learning Online, with in-person instruction. Having a single touchpoint for learners and staff to teach, learn, communicate, and share ideas has been foundational for Activate Learning’s operations.

Award Winning Online Education

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when buildings were forced to shut down, Activate Learning had the advantage of moving to virtual learning easily. Their platform, Activate Learning Online, was already up and running for offering online courses to all of their learners. The instructors and learners that were affected by the pandemic shutdowns were easily moved over to Activate Learning Online, which is powered by BigBlueButton and Canvas. After the pandemic ended, some online classes continued to run on BigBlueButton. Activate Learning was given the Beacon Award for their effective use of technology, including the use of BigBlueButton, and their students achieving high outcomes on their GCSEs. Activate Learning is a customer of Blindside Networks, the company that started the BigBlueButton project.

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Welcome to Part 2 of our specialized blog series, geared to address teachers’ concerns about monitoring student engagement when students aren’t using their webcams. In Part 1 of this series, we pointed out a common worry from teachers: if students don’t use their webcams it is hard to tell how much they engage with the material and if they are learning. We also offered insights on harnessing your longstanding in-class experience to augment student participation in the digital environment.

In this follow-up post, we introduce you to six exceptional BigBlueButton tools. These tools aim to maximize the deep learning potential of virtual classrooms, ensuring your students remain actively engaged throughout the class. Stay tuned!

BigBlueButton Engagement Tools for the Virtual Classroom

Successful teaching recognizes that one size doesn’t fit all and employs varied techniques for effective learning. This is critical in a virtual setting where physical interaction is absent. Understanding and utilizing your virtual classroom capabilities can revolutionize student engagement and success. Hence, knowing your virtual classroom isn’t just essential; it’s game-changing.

Break free from the constraints of traditional webcam-based lessons and step into a new era of interactive learning with BigBlueButton’s easy-to-use suite of features. Here are the top 6 engagement tools that you need to master for optimized student learning outcomes: 

 

Poll Slides: Assess Student Knowledge Instantly

This unique feature reads the text of your slides into memory, smartly detects potential polling questions, and empowers you, the Educator, to launch a poll with just one simple click. This advanced technology extends to all the different types of polling questions you might create. Imagine creating polls on the go without the cumbersome process of manually typing each question in! Watch this tutorial video to master this time-saving feature that boosts student engagement.

 

Multi-user Whiteboard: Encourage Collaboration and Discussion

Imagine a classroom without boundaries, where students and teachers can draw, highlight, and write directly on the presentation. The shared whiteboard feature invites multiple users to collaborate to make their points or illustrate ideas. It’s a dynamic tool for fostering active learning, enabling visual assessments, and enhancing student engagement. Experience the power of collective learning with this feature, making education more interactive, engaging, and efficient. Check out our whiteboard tutorial video now.

 

Break-out Rooms: Foster Smaller Group Interaction

This comprehensive tool allows you to create up to 24 breakout rooms in a single session, enabling students to brainstorm or work on assignments in small, manageable groups. This unique approach fosters a team-working environment and cultivates diverse creative processes. Educators can give real-time feedback and save any ideas from the virtual whiteboard or shared notes to bring back to the main session. Watch our tutorial video on break-out rooms to encourage a rich discussion and learning experience for your virtual classroom.

 

Chat Feature: Facilitate Communication and Feedback

Designed to foster a vibrant community of students and teachers, our chat feature promotes meaningful engagement and participation. This tool allows for instantaneous, relevant, and dynamic feedback that breaks down the barriers between teachers and learners, resulting in an education experience that is more inclusive and participatory than ever before.

 

Shared Notes: Promote Real-Time Collaboration

This isn’t just your average notepad – it empowers you to capture the key points from live sessions within one platform. It promotes collaboration by letting multiple individuals type simultaneously, enhancing active engagement. The Educator can control who has access to the notes, locking or unlocking them as needed for the optimal learning or working environment. And the best part? Once you’ve wrapped up your session, download the notes in your preferred format for easy reference. To get started, check out our tutorial video.

 

Learning Analytics Dashboard: Monitor Student Participation and Progress

Amplify your teaching potential with our Learning Analytics Dashboard, a powerful tool tailored to meet your students’ needs. This intuitive dashboard offers live analytics during class sessions, enabling Educators to offer timely feedback and personalized learning experiences. Key insights include individual class duration, engagement levels, and comprehension inferred from polling responses. This invaluable data, crucial for crafting an effective teaching strategy, is readily available in various LMS (like Moodle, Canvas etc.) in csv format post-session.

 

“Understanding and utilizing your virtual classroom capabilities can revolutionize student engagement and success. “

Integrate these tools gradually into your classes to create a seamless online teaching environment. By utilizing these features, you can focus less on webcam usage and more on enhancing the learning experience for both you and your students. See our support documentation for more information on how to seamlessly transform your virtual classroom with the BigBlueButton platform today!

 

 

 

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Teaching to ‘black boxes’ often feels like you’re not teaching to anyone. Some teachers even wonder if it’s an act of defiance from the students or if the students have ghosted the lesson altogether. What has been learned, in this new era of online teaching, is that student engagement is not based on whether or not they turn on their cameras. There are a variety of reasons students might avoid presenting a digital close up of their faces. 

Regardless of whether students turn on their screens, a teacher’s job is still the same: to share knowledge, provide guidance, and encourage student engagement. Encouraging student engagement might seem like the most challenging task. Just like how helpful it is for students to have informative feedback, it is also helpful for teachers to receive feedback from students to know how and when they are engaging with the material.

This feedback doesn’t have to come from their webcams. There are many skills that teachers already possess, especially if they have experience teaching in-person. But these skills may not have been adapted to the virtual classroom because staring at your own face while teaching is distracting, right? We all need reminders to recall those foundations, especially when teaching online is a new approach. How, specifically, can we encourage student engagement using in-person skills that we might already know?

Transferring In-Person Teaching Skills to Online

Here are a few strategies to increase student engagement online:

• Offer students an orientation: Make sure students are comfortable with and know the tools of the platform so that they know how to participate. Before your first class, share this Student overview to get them started with the BigBlueButton online classroom. 
• Connect with students before class: Prior to class start time, when students walk into a physical classroom, we greet them. In a virtual classroom, we can do the same. The great thing about a virtual classroom is that, in a sense, they will be wearing a nametag each time they enter. We will never get the chance to forget anyone’s name!
• Encourage questions during and after the lesson: Remind students at the beginning of class to ask questions or share comments during class via the Hand Raise button with a direct message to you or a group message to the class. They can also use the Emoji features to share reactions. Not every student is comfortable raising their hand in front of classmates, so the online platform offers less conspicuous ways of engaging. Teachers can use the Lock Feature if needing uninterrupted lesson time.
• Ask students questions and allow some awkward silence: Pause your lesson and ask students questions throughout the lesson. After asking questions, allow for a pause (which is only awkward if you make it that way). Yes, asking students questions is part of Teaching 101, but when you can’t see how students are processing your questions, teachers can jump in too quickly with the answers themselves.

• Set homework and give time to complete in-class: Just as in physical classrooms, students might have to work outside of the lesson, alone or in groups. Tasks set and completed ‘at home’ can be assessed as usual through work submitted, feedback, or demonstrations in the classroom. Teachers can give time to start or complete the homework in class.
• Provide incentives: Give rewards for participation, such as leaving time at the end of completed work to do a fun activity or socialize. You could also set up a friendly competition, either within groups or classroom-wide. 

You can see that none of these strategies require students to turn on their cameras. While you still might prefer to see the students you teach, there are many ways to get to know your students and motivate them with these strategies. BigBlueButton is designed for the ease and success of online teaching. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post to help you increase student engagement online using tools offered in the BigBlueButton platform. If you have any questions about how BigBlueButton can work for you, connect with us here. 

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