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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• October 24, 2023

BigBlueButton a Winner at Prestigious Moodle Certified Partner Awards 2023

Moodle, the world’s most popular open-source LMS, has awarded BigBlueButton the Outstanding Growth Award during the MoodleMoot Global 2023 Conference this year in Barcelona, Spain!

Presented to Moodle Certified Partners who have achieved the highest percentage of growth in revenue globally for Moodle in the preceding year, BigBlueButton was one of just two recipients. Read on to learn more about our journey to becoming a Moodle Certified Integration Partner.

Moodle Integration

After being logged as the 2nd most downloaded plugin during the pandemic, BigBlueButton was fully integrated as the default virtual classroom during the Moodle 4.0 update in April 2022.

On the road to full integration, BigBlueButton was steadily optimized for each release of Moodle. This led to several Early Bird Awards before becoming a Certified Integration Partner (CIP) in 2022.

Thank You Blindside and BigBlueButton Developers!

BigBlueButton sends a huge shout out of thanks to its platform creators, Blindside Networks, and the BigBlueButton developer community for their role in building our outstanding popularity among Moodle users! We also thank Blindside Networks’ work in supporting Moodle LMS administrators. 

What’s next for BigBlueButton inside of Moodle? Sub-plugins are coming in Moodle 4.3!  Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on BigBlueButton releases and integration features within Moodle. 

Learn more about BigBlueButton and Moodle

• BigBlueButton’s Moodle Integration
• How to use BigBlueButton in Moodle 
• How to Effectively Teach with BigBlueButton in Moodle
• Watch our Presentation on AI, Analytics and the Future of BigBlueButton 

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Like many academic institutions, the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP), which specializes in engineering and computing, had to adapt to the requirements of the pandemic with very little warning. Although as an institution they believe that face-to-face is the best approach, they had also been investigating blended learning tools when the pandemic hit. This meant they weren’t completely unprepared.

For starters, they had identified Canvas as their preferred learning management system (LMS) but hadn’t settled on a main online platform. They experimented with a number of tools such as MS Teams, Google Classroom and Zoom. But the teachers and students gravitated to BigBlueButton, citing its classroom approach as preferable to the simple video conferencing approach of the other tools. According to T.I.P. IT Officer Allen Go, they first heard of BBB through their LMS, but BigBlueButton’s classroom features sealed the deal.

We chose BBB as our main online platform because it offers different features suitable for teaching and learning. It\’s seamlessly integrated into our LMS which gives easy access to virtual classrooms with just a click.

Teacher feedback on the new features of BigBlueButton (version 2.4) praised features like the ability to randomly select students.

shy students are reluctant to share their thoughts or raise a hand, so teachers enjoy being able to call on students who otherwise wouldn’t volunteer.

The multi-user whiteboard affords a lot of benefits as teachers and students can collaborate in real-time. Teachers also appreciate the Emoji feature, which gives the students the ability to emotionally express themselves during their online classroom. T.I.P. administrators praised the scalability of BBB and its ability to be run in a multi-server environment. The integration with their LMS offered them a number of advantages such as analytics, which gives them access to statistics on the activities of teachers and students per session.

Polling is useful in getting the ideas or opinions for a particular question. Before the start of the class, for example, educators will ask a question and will poll students to engage them and set the tone for the classroom.

T.I.P. administrators praised the scalability of BBB and its ability to be run in a multi-server environment. The integration with their LMS offered them a number of advantages such as analytics, which gives them access to statistics on the activities of teachers and students per session.

The BBB Learning Dashboard … enables teachers to view student participation and engagement throughout the session, which is very crucial in tracking the learning development of their students.

Allen Go, Chief Technology Officer at Technological Institute of the Philippines said that “T.I.P. has used BigBlueButton for hosting over 150,000 online classes. We evaluated other products and concluded that BigBlueButton empowers our teachers to provide the best virtual classroom experience for their students.”

With its emphasis on innovation and digitization, the move to blended online teaching for T.I.P. wasn’t unexpected. But, like many institutions, the pandemic accelerated the move. “The pandemic has transformed the way we teach and learn. Given the challenges, there is no replacement for traditional in-classroom teaching. But there is room for enhancement. With BBB, teachers become adept with technology and feel that they are still inside their classrooms, all while ensuring that students also have the best online learning experience.”

END

We’re firm believers in education playing a role in bettering the world presently, and in the future. To achieve this, our mission is to develop the world’s next-generation virtual classroom application, and it’s through partnerships like this that help bring us one step closer to achieving it.

We’re excited to continue working with the Technological Institute of the Philippines to provide educators and students throughout the organization with an online learning experience that’s effective and affordable.

About BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton is the world’s virtual classroom. Originally created in a Canadian university, it is now built into the world’s most popular learning management systems (LMS), including Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, D2L, Jenzabar, and Schoology – together comprising over 75% of global LMS deployments. BigBlueButton is a growing open-source project, with over 150 developers and commercial companies around the world enhancing the project for teachers and students. Thanks to this community, BigBlueButton is now localized into over 55.  For more information, see: https://bigbluebutton.org/.

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French Ministry of Education chooses BigBlueButton

From there, BigBlueButton became the primary mode of communication and learning for the country of France. When asked why BigBlueButton was chosen over other available virtual classroom platforms, Laurent remarked that:

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BigBlueButton featured on Discovery Channel’s ‘Tomorrow’s World Today' series

The mission of the BigBlueButton project is to create the world’s most effective virtual classroom, one that maximises time for applied learning and feedback.

This mission was recently featured in Season 5 of the Emmy-nominated series Tomorrow’s World Today, a Discovery Channel series that explores cutting-edge technology that is shaping our future for the better.  The series regularly features pioneers working towards that future.  In the episode below, Fred Dixon, BigBlueButton’s Product Manager, shares his experiences scaling BigBlueButton to massive numbers of concurrent teachers and students.  He shares his thoughts about the future of a pedagogic-centric virtual classroom and how BigBlueButton is working towards that future. 

“Filming this episode at Carleton University, the birthplace of BigBlueButton, was a lot of fun,” says Fred Dixon. “We’ve been focused on a vision of improving virtual classrooms by starting with the needs of the educators wanting to assess students in the moment (not after the class), and it was satisfying to see how the Discover Channel captured that vision in a few minutes of the segment.”

About BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton is the world’s virtual classroom. Originally created in a Canadian university, it is now built-into the world’s most popular learning management systems (LMS), including Moodle Canvas, Sakai, D2L, Jenzabar, and Schoology – together comprising over 75% of global LMS deployments.

BigBlueButton is a growing open source project, with over 150 developers and commercial companies around the world enhancing the project for teachers and students. Thanks to this community, BigBlueButton is now localised into over 55 languages. 

To try BigBlueButton out yourself, click here.

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AVID Success Story - Blindside Networks

A Non-profit Building The Next Generation Of Leaders Using BigBlueButton

AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) is an educational non-profit that was established in 1980. AVID is implemented in approximately 8,000+ PreK–16 schools in 47 states across the United States, plus schools in the Department of Defence Education Activity (DoDEA), Canada, and Australia. AVID changes lives by helping schools shift to a more equitable, engaging, rigorous, and student-centred approach. We train educators to close the opportunity gap through professional development, curriculum resources and ongoing support, so they can prepare all students for college, careers, and life.

“In 2019, after using traditional web-conferencing systems for their online training and meetings, AVID began looking for a product that had a seamless integration with their eLearning platform and was easy to use.”

said AVID’s Senior Learning Designer, Marc Dembowski

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Barcelona schools put their hands up for open source

In 2018, a group of families in Barcelona raised concerns over the collection of their children’s data by companies like Google that provide the educational software that schools were using in the classroom. As one of the mothers, Cecilia Baio, expressed it, the families did not want “our children to see that their right to privacy is under threat and be the forerunners of the business that Google is in, collecting our data to create products that influence our behavior.”

“We aggregated these tools because we believe in their longevity and future stability. They provide similar feature sets, but with all the added benefits that come with using publicly accessible software, including clearer transparency into data collection and its management.”

said Levi

“We’re proud to have BigBlueButton included in the Democratic Digitisation suite, and we support the movement to provide access to a high-quality online education in a way that protects student’s privacy.”

says Fred Dixon, Product Manager for BigBlueButton.

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Success Story:

School on Wheels

BigBlueButton Helps Provide Online Education To Homeless Children

To help their students overcome technological barriers, School on Wheels distributed over 1,000 devices and hundreds of hotspots since March 2020.

Technology is important because our students aren’t likely to have access to their own devices and to meaningful interactions with technology.

says Emma Gerch, Learning Digital Specialist at School on Wheels.

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Success Story:

Kids’ Club Spanish School

Kids’ Club Spanish School gives online Spanish immersion lessons to children primarily from the United States and Canada, ages 5-13. In 2018 they switched to using BigBlueButton for their tutoring platform, where they continue using it to this day.

Alexis Fishbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder of Kids’ Club Spanish School says:

“The flexibility and customization that BigBlueButton enabled allowed us to create an experience that benefits our students every day.” 

BigBlueButton enabled Kids’ Club to modify the default virtual classroom layout for a younger audience, focusing on a layout that was less distracting so students could better focus on the educational content. 

BigBlueButton strives in providing ample accommodations for educators’ needs, no matter how niche. It’s part of our mission to become the world’s most teacher-centric virtual classroom in the world.

Kids’ Club Spanish School has now been using BigBlueButton for more than three years and Alexis says: 

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