NM Educators and greater learning community,
I am pleased to announce the resumption of the NM Community Big Blue Button Project. I will use this page to update those with whom we test the server of our current status. At present, I have purchased a new domain, set up a vanilla instance with TLS, basic greenlight, and disabled demos. The new domain to access the server is: https://nmbbb.club. The wiki for this project, which will document setup, configs, troubleshooting, etc., will be over here: Wiki NMBB.
Some of you might have missed my first post and/or lack familiarity with Big Blue Button, so before I go any further, let me remind you what Big Blue Button is! Big Blue Button is a global teaching platform, or in short, it is like an open-source or FLOSS version of Zoom, designed by teachers and built by teachers. As opposed to Zoom, there are features directly applicable to teacher workflow, like digital whiteboards, ether pad, and highly customizable break out rooms, LMS integration, poles/emojis, screen readers and more. If you ask me personally, it is the ideal digital classroom software to work with to perfect my instruction.
Why is a project needed? Well, Big Blue Button partners with schools and colleges often, but not every school chooses to purchase a fully hosted / Enterprise version of their platform. In these cases, the Big Blue Button integration is powered by their community server, which can easily be overloaded when three or more classes are in session at the same time. And even though BBB is freely given out for people to self-host, most small schools/colleges lack the expertise and/or budget to keep these instances running, while casual sysadmins often lack the throughput/bandwidth and/or hardware to run an effective instance. Thus, both for me personally and for other NM educators to whom this project will be freely open for sign up, this is a very promising resource for student learning and effective teacher pedagogy.
Now, as soon as public testing is available, we will update this post here with that information. Until then, we will use this page for basic status updates on client testing for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, Android, iOS, and Lineage based platforms. The results of those tests and the associated errors will be posted in the matrix below. The detailed work toward fixing these stages, errors, etc. will be posted in the aforementioned Wiki above. Email support@haacksnetworking.com if you are interested in volunteering.
Windows –
macOS –
GNU/Linux –
Android –
iOS –
Lineage –
Thanks for swinging by!
Kindly,
Jonathan Haack
Director, Haack’s Networking