Free distance education
Free distance education. Do-it-yourself distance learning, or how to create a platform for webinars based on free software.
Hello, dear community!
This article is devoted to the issue of distance education (or, as it is now fashionable to say, e-learning) and is intended primarily for employees of the IT services of universities and other educational institutions who are faced with the problem of technical support of events in a distance form. The same article will be interesting to everyone who is somehow connected with the organization of distance education.
Annotation: the article considers the possibility of building a distance education platform based on free software for classes with small audiences (up to 50 people) in a webinar mode with interactive elements.
Keywords: distance education, moodle, bigbluebutton
Here is a circle of completely ordinary tasks, for the solution of which you may need experience, which we will share in this article:
- management sets the task: to make an internal selector for meetings;
- the head of the department asks to deploy a platform for conducting advanced training courses for new partners from Vietnam;
- the director of the center for advanced training of schoolchildren suggests using remote technologies so that students from remote areas can connect and see the teacher, and most importantly, the board on which they solve problems;
- the comrade strongly asks to organize a virtual room for a weekly discussion of future performances of the city team for slow smoking a pipe, and Skype is not suitable - there are 11 people in the team, and the restriction of Skype is 10.
')
Tasks are quite different, but they have several similar parameters. And their main similarity: the budget is either very limited or equal to zero. When a situation arises that something is needed and needed, as a rule, yesterday, free software comes to the rescue. We started with a great article about BigBlueButton , published on Habré. Dismantling unnecessarily bright expectations helped review the services for corporate training , which makes it clear that you need to pay for quality. We also turned to a comparison of modern means of distance education in Wikipedia . If you sort the first column by license type (distribution conditions), you can see a very short list of what may suit us (remember, we assume that our budget is zero):
We compared the available demos, examined the information on the official websites and feedback on the experience of use, and as a result chose BBB for the experiments. Openmeetings came closest to him, but scared away with a heaped functionality that is completely unnecessary for our tasks and a negative feedback on the experience of using . The BigBlueButton functionality is perfectly presented on their official website :
- flow delimitation: audio, video, presentation material;
- audio stream uses VOIP;
- the presentation is loaded directly from the server and at the same time is the teacher’s “working board”: it is possible to choose the color and thickness of the marker (as well as the main geometric shapes) and highlight the main thing on the slide;
- chat window with private messages;
- the ability to demonstrate the desktop;
- recording of lectures;
The first implementation. Technological platform for conducting seminars online
Considering my experience with virtual machines ( my first article on Habré is devoted to it ), a ready virtual machine turned out to be a very pleasant service from BBB. Deploying it, you are in your network, "locally", get a ready-made customized server. A demo version of the deployed server can be seen here .
Very pleased with the possibility of using the API. Since our initial task was to broadcast training courses for ordinary teachers to remote areas, a number of system requirements appeared:
A few words about the API. The creators of BigBlueButton are positioning their product as a server for webinars, which is not responsible for monitoring and authorizing users, which is why you will not find an administrator account and user control panel. A third-party script, or a management system through interaction with the BBB through the API, must be responsible for this. Today, there are ready-made integration modules with popular CMS, such as Wordpress, Joomla, Moodle, etc. For our project, in general, there was enough functionality of the BigBlueButton demo server, but we still needed some administration capabilities.
As a result, it was done: the administrator’s control panel, which set up a new virtual room for the web conference and set the tutor’s password (the presenter, with the right to disable other users, download and manage the presentation, display the desktop), while on the project’s main page there was news of a future event. Other users connected to the event using any login, and the password was left blank. An interesting fact: the webinars themselves were created on request, but in most of the applications, the authors asked not to display information about the event on the main page of the project, since this is “an internal event, we would not want there to be extra people”. The project itself was made by students in the course work.
The second implementation. Group distance learning system
Use of the 1st project went with varying success. Somewhere everything went very well and smoothly, somewhere there were questions and problems. As a result, it was necessary either to redo the 1st project radically, or to launch a new separate project with the following requirements:
Firstly, it was necessary to limit access to various events and to automate this process as much as possible. Ideally, there is a course manager who himself records the listeners and alerts about events.
It is also a good idea to have visual statistics: who attended the webinar and when.
And, most importantly, if everyone was satisfied with the format of the event itself (everyone can see and hear everything), now the logical requirement was the possibility of recording past events and access to listeners.
As a result, it was decided to launch a new project.
In BigBlueButton, deployed from a virtual machine, the ability to write is immediately. However, it is limited to audio streaming and presentation slides. Perhaps for you this will be quite enough. However, in our case, the prerequisite was the use of an interactive whiteboard by the teacher (solving math problems for 11 classes). The content of the web chat and webcams also wanted to record.
Fortunately, most of the features we needed were implemented in the beta version of BigBlueButton (for details on the installation here ). Installation takes a little longer than deploying a virtual machine image, but, in general, nothing complicated. As a result, you get a new version with the ability to record everything that happens during a web conference, except for the demonstration of the desktop. We arranged this option, we stopped at it.
The solution for recording all activity also exists and is implemented using the Matterhorn . This is a free video capture software for lectures that integrates with BigBlueButton and allows you to record all the activity that takes place in the web conferencing window. It requires a separate server, so we decided to do without these additional features.
After the problem with the recording was solved, there was a question about user management. Since this project was designed for a school environment, for 11 grades, and positioned as preparatory courses, we needed a mandatory user authorization. We are trying to use free software in our projects, and it was logical to use not a self-written, but a ready-made integration module with CMS. As a CMS for the project site, we chose the popular Moodle Cruise Management System today. As a result, the project was reduced to two virtual machines:
BigBlueButton for the organization of distance learning classes in online mode
Web server: Moodle with the BigBlueButton integration module (it allows you to add the BigBlueButton Video Selection module and the BigBlueButton Recording resource to your course)
Webinar organization
After a few lessons, we came up with the following event scheme:
Perhaps this is not the optimal solution in terms of audio and video quality, but all of these elements were available and allowed to organize events in remote form without additional investments.
Well, a few pictures of how it all looks in the end (the BBB window itself, the list of recorded lectures, viewing the recorded lecture):
Conclusion
If you are looking for a simple and convenient solution for remote events or webinars for a small audience on an ongoing basis and you have a separate server, or the ability to start a virtual machine for this task, then BigBlueButton is quite suitable, and most importantly a free solution that will work and cope with their tasks.
The question remains open to the maximum possible load of the BBB, this study is proposed to be carried out in the future (if you are interested, information on how to do this is available here ).
In the course of researching the issue of organizing distance education, one can very often see the use of the Moodle system. However, few people use external modules for organizing online lectures with interactive elements, and the courses themselves are reduced to the availability of lectures in electronic form and tests on the material studied. Using BBB in addition to lectures and tests will allow you and your students to significantly improve the process of acquiring knowledge, and the interactive mode (chat and the opportunity to ask a teacher during an online voice lecture) will ensure that the listeners are interested in the subject being studied during the lesson. the possibility of adjusting the method of presenting material to the audience during the lecture (as opposed to watching video lectures). A huge effect is achieved when students connect their own cameras, or a camera with a general view of a class with a student, and all participants in an online event can see not only the teacher, but also each other.
Many will disagree and say that no distance form will replace a living teacher and the “classical” training system (chalk + blackboard), agree 100%, but when it comes to remote areas or distance learning for people with disabilities, the alternative is better than any
PS: Offer
If for some reason you need help or advice on installing, configuring and using BigBlueButton (integration into Moodle, Joomla or WP or into other content management systems), you can contact us at elearn@tspu.edu.ru or on skype elearn.tomsk and ask an interesting question.
Our students are also interested in doing practical work and writing interesting course projects on this topic (and generally on the use of information technologies in the educational process). If you think that they can help in your enterprise or in your educational institution, we will happy to cooperate. As a result, you will receive the implementation of the necessary technologies in your organization at a decent level, and our students will have experience, as well as strong and interesting course projects.
PS: Continuation of this article here: Online learning center based on free software in 15 minutes, or BigBlueButton again
Hello, dear community!
This article is devoted to the issue of distance education (or, as it is now fashionable to say, e-learning) and is intended primarily for employees of the IT services of universities and other educational institutions who are faced with the problem of technical support of events in a distance form. The same article will be interesting to everyone who is somehow connected with the organization of distance education.
Annotation: the article considers the possibility of building a distance education platform based on free software for classes with small audiences (up to 50 people) in a webinar mode with interactive elements.
Keywords: distance education, moodle, bigbluebutton
Here is a circle of completely ordinary tasks, for the solution of which you may need experience, which we will share in this article:
- management sets the task: to make an internal selector for meetings;
- the head of the department asks to deploy a platform for conducting advanced training courses for new partners from Vietnam;
- the director of the center for advanced training of schoolchildren suggests using remote technologies so that students from remote areas can connect and see the teacher, and most importantly, the board on which they solve problems;
- the comrade strongly asks to organize a virtual room for a weekly discussion of future performances of the city team for slow smoking a pipe, and Skype is not suitable - there are 11 people in the team, and the restriction of Skype is 10.
')
Tasks are quite different, but they have several similar parameters. And their main similarity: the budget is either very limited or equal to zero. When a situation arises that something is needed and needed, as a rule, yesterday, free software comes to the rescue. We started with a great article about BigBlueButton , published on Habré. Dismantling unnecessarily bright expectations helped review the services for corporate training , which makes it clear that you need to pay for quality. We also turned to a comparison of modern means of distance education in Wikipedia . If you sort the first column by license type (distribution conditions), you can see a very short list of what may suit us (remember, we assume that our budget is zero):
- Meetecho ;
- Tokbox ;
We compared the available demos, examined the information on the official websites and feedback on the experience of use, and as a result chose BBB for the experiments. Openmeetings came closest to him, but scared away with a heaped functionality that is completely unnecessary for our tasks and a negative feedback on the experience of using . The BigBlueButton functionality is perfectly presented on their official website :
- flow delimitation: audio, video, presentation material;
- audio stream uses VOIP;
- the presentation is loaded directly from the server and at the same time is the teacher’s “working board”: it is possible to choose the color and thickness of the marker (as well as the main geometric shapes) and highlight the main thing on the slide;
- chat window with private messages;
- the ability to demonstrate the desktop;
- recording of lectures;
The first implementation. Technological platform for conducting seminars online
Considering my experience with virtual machines ( my first article on Habré is devoted to it ), a ready virtual machine turned out to be a very pleasant service from BBB. Deploying it, you are in your network, "locally", get a ready-made customized server. A demo version of the deployed server can be seen here .
Very pleased with the possibility of using the API. Since our initial task was to broadcast training courses for ordinary teachers to remote areas, a number of system requirements appeared:
- Minimum user problems. You need a universal solution that does not require the installation of additional software. Ideally: only the browser and the Internet, preferably without any registrations. (Verbatim requirement: "to just turn on and work!").
- Minimal difficulties for the lecturer. It is clear that the teacher himself, who lectures for a remote audience, also does not really want to delve into the technology, but simply wants to give his course “as usual”.
- Local video server location. There are different solutions for distance courses in the format of a web service: both paid and free. However, using them is not always possible due to the remoteness of the video broadcast server itself, which leads to delays, especially for those conference participants who use “narrow” communication channels. (It is worth noting that if we are talking about organizing a selector, or some webinar inside a local network, the option with web services completely disappears, and in general, when everything is stored in your server room, somehow calmly, ).
A few words about the API. The creators of BigBlueButton are positioning their product as a server for webinars, which is not responsible for monitoring and authorizing users, which is why you will not find an administrator account and user control panel. A third-party script, or a management system through interaction with the BBB through the API, must be responsible for this. Today, there are ready-made integration modules with popular CMS, such as Wordpress, Joomla, Moodle, etc. For our project, in general, there was enough functionality of the BigBlueButton demo server, but we still needed some administration capabilities.
As a result, it was done: the administrator’s control panel, which set up a new virtual room for the web conference and set the tutor’s password (the presenter, with the right to disable other users, download and manage the presentation, display the desktop), while on the project’s main page there was news of a future event. Other users connected to the event using any login, and the password was left blank. An interesting fact: the webinars themselves were created on request, but in most of the applications, the authors asked not to display information about the event on the main page of the project, since this is “an internal event, we would not want there to be extra people”. The project itself was made by students in the course work.
The second implementation. Group distance learning system
Use of the 1st project went with varying success. Somewhere everything went very well and smoothly, somewhere there were questions and problems. As a result, it was necessary either to redo the 1st project radically, or to launch a new separate project with the following requirements:
Firstly, it was necessary to limit access to various events and to automate this process as much as possible. Ideally, there is a course manager who himself records the listeners and alerts about events.
It is also a good idea to have visual statistics: who attended the webinar and when.
And, most importantly, if everyone was satisfied with the format of the event itself (everyone can see and hear everything), now the logical requirement was the possibility of recording past events and access to listeners.
As a result, it was decided to launch a new project.
In BigBlueButton, deployed from a virtual machine, the ability to write is immediately. However, it is limited to audio streaming and presentation slides. Perhaps for you this will be quite enough. However, in our case, the prerequisite was the use of an interactive whiteboard by the teacher (solving math problems for 11 classes). The content of the web chat and webcams also wanted to record.
Fortunately, most of the features we needed were implemented in the beta version of BigBlueButton (for details on the installation here ). Installation takes a little longer than deploying a virtual machine image, but, in general, nothing complicated. As a result, you get a new version with the ability to record everything that happens during a web conference, except for the demonstration of the desktop. We arranged this option, we stopped at it.
The solution for recording all activity also exists and is implemented using the Matterhorn . This is a free video capture software for lectures that integrates with BigBlueButton and allows you to record all the activity that takes place in the web conferencing window. It requires a separate server, so we decided to do without these additional features.
After the problem with the recording was solved, there was a question about user management. Since this project was designed for a school environment, for 11 grades, and positioned as preparatory courses, we needed a mandatory user authorization. We are trying to use free software in our projects, and it was logical to use not a self-written, but a ready-made integration module with CMS. As a CMS for the project site, we chose the popular Moodle Cruise Management System today. As a result, the project was reduced to two virtual machines:
BigBlueButton for the organization of distance learning classes in online mode
Web server: Moodle with the BigBlueButton integration module (it allows you to add the BigBlueButton Video Selection module and the BigBlueButton Recording resource to your course)
Webinar organization
After a few lessons, we came up with the following event scheme:
- two video sources:
- general plan (webcam + laptop)
- whiteboard (webcam aimed at a whiteboard or interactive whiteboard)
- sound from the teacher's bluetooth headset.
Perhaps this is not the optimal solution in terms of audio and video quality, but all of these elements were available and allowed to organize events in remote form without additional investments.
Well, a few pictures of how it all looks in the end (the BBB window itself, the list of recorded lectures, viewing the recorded lecture):
Conclusion
If you are looking for a simple and convenient solution for remote events or webinars for a small audience on an ongoing basis and you have a separate server, or the ability to start a virtual machine for this task, then BigBlueButton is quite suitable, and most importantly a free solution that will work and cope with their tasks.
The question remains open to the maximum possible load of the BBB, this study is proposed to be carried out in the future (if you are interested, information on how to do this is available here ).
In the course of researching the issue of organizing distance education, one can very often see the use of the Moodle system. However, few people use external modules for organizing online lectures with interactive elements, and the courses themselves are reduced to the availability of lectures in electronic form and tests on the material studied. Using BBB in addition to lectures and tests will allow you and your students to significantly improve the process of acquiring knowledge, and the interactive mode (chat and the opportunity to ask a teacher during an online voice lecture) will ensure that the listeners are interested in the subject being studied during the lesson. the possibility of adjusting the method of presenting material to the audience during the lecture (as opposed to watching video lectures). A huge effect is achieved when students connect their own cameras, or a camera with a general view of a class with a student, and all participants in an online event can see not only the teacher, but also each other.
Many will disagree and say that no distance form will replace a living teacher and the “classical” training system (chalk + blackboard), agree 100%, but when it comes to remote areas or distance learning for people with disabilities, the alternative is better than any
PS: Offer
If for some reason you need help or advice on installing, configuring and using BigBlueButton (integration into Moodle, Joomla or WP or into other content management systems), you can contact us at elearn@tspu.edu.ru or on skype elearn.tomsk and ask an interesting question.
Our students are also interested in doing practical work and writing interesting course projects on this topic (and generally on the use of information technologies in the educational process). If you think that they can help in your enterprise or in your educational institution, we will happy to cooperate. As a result, you will receive the implementation of the necessary technologies in your organization at a decent level, and our students will have experience, as well as strong and interesting course projects.
PS: Continuation of this article here: Online learning center based on free software in 15 minutes, or BigBlueButton again
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/161783/
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