Keeping an eye on BigBlueButton

In this blog post about the recent Blackboard acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate, Geoff Cain wrote

I will be watching Blackboard closely on how they work with Elluminate while keeping a weather eye on BigBlueButton (which, coincidentally integrates with Sakai) and other open source options.

We'll be keeping our eye on BigBlueButton too!

Commercial or Open Source?

Blackboard announced today they are acquiring Elluminate and Wimba, two major software vendors it the virtual conferencing space, for $116 million in cash. Michael Chasen, President and Chief Executive of Blackboard, said:

Elluminate's and Wimba's technologies are expected to grow "as institutions look for cost-effective ways to encourage social learning and support learning interactions of all kinds."

The part about "cost-effective" obviously relates to other commercial products. But what does this acquisition mean for open source-based learning solutions?

In a letter to Blackboard's customers, Michael goes on to say:

We will continue current Elluminate and Wimba integration work for open source products, and it is our strategy to sustain those bridges with other commercial LMS providers as well.

Blackboard clearly wants to continue to sell its commercial web conferencing solutions to universities and colleges that are already using open source solutions (such as Moodle and Sakai). Which is fine, every company has to make money.

But what if universities and colleges had an open source web solution that integrated with Moodle and Sakai?

What if they had a really good open source alternative that offered real-time collaboration, virtual classrooms, and enabled any student anywhere in the world to have a high-quality learning experience?

What if that alternative was truly an open source project, not just in name, but in the way it has supported its global community of users and developers over the past two years.

And what if that alternative that was backed by not one company, but by a global community of companies all improving the software for the benefit of everyone?

That’s what we’re working hard to provide with BigBlueButton.

We believe that the real-time learning space will explode in the next two years as networks get faster, access spreads to remote students, and universities and colleges increasingly become global educational intuitions.

We believe that just as other open source projects have provided world-class databases, web browsers, and operating systems, the BigBlueButton open source project can provide a world-class web conferencing system for distance education.

We believe that universities and colleges who are building on open source solutions will also want the choice of a solid, tested, and supported open source solution for real-time distance education.

We want to give them that choice with BigBlueButton.

Sakai User Conference Report

Fred Dixon and Denis Zgonjanin, two employees of Blindside Networks, demonstrated BigBlueButton last week to the over 400+ conference attendees in Denver, Colorado.

The buzz around BigBlueButton began on the first day when it was featured during the developer bootcamp sessions as "a showcase example" of a how to integrate with Sakai (thanks again to Nuno Fernandes and Adrian Fish for their first-class Sakai Integration for BigBlueButton).

When showing BigBlueButton, we started off each demo with the phrase "While are many commercial web conferencing systems, we are trying to build for you a good open source alternative for distance education."

We received lots of positive feedback and kudos on the BigBlueButton project, which reflected very well on all the committers who have been working hard on this project over the past three years.

It was our first exposure to the Sakai community, and the community is very strong. In particular, we enjoyed meeting with Scott Siddall and the others from Longsight who are exploring offering BigBlueButton directly to their customers. We look forward to working with them and attending future Sakai conferences and events!

BigBlueButton will be at the Sakai User Conference in Denver, June 15-17

Two members of Blindside Networks, Denis Zgonjanin and Fred Dixon, will be demonstrating BigBlueButton at the 2010 Sakai User Conference in Denver June 15-17.

If you are attending the conference and would like to meet, contact us or drop by our booth.

Whiteboard Video

We've created a new overview video showing how the whiteboard works in BigBlueButton 0.7.

The video is available for viewing here.

Less is More

Paul Left, an educational writer in NZ, wrote that BigBlueButton

... appears to have fewer features but it has enough to be a very effective tool for synchronous learning and teaching

Paul, we're trying hard to keep everything simple and straightforward!

BigBlueButton on trial at EDC

Carleton University's Educational Development Center blogged about their trial use of BigBlueButton this summer.