Some may say “Good bye, Elluminate/Wimba. Hello, BigBlueButton”
On the recent post, “What the Blackboard Acquisition means for Moodle“, Denis Zgonjanin commented that a possible open source alternative to both Wimba and Elluminate resides in BigBlueButton.
BBB is only 2 years old and is an open source synchronous education tool. In response to the acquisition, the official BigBlueButton blog says,
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. [link]
Unlike Elluminate and Wimba, BigBlueButton will require some technical expertise to set up a server to run the software. You can however check it out at their demo site [http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/].
From a cursory review I can say that the software opened seamlessly, without any trouble on my laptop (which is running Linux Ubuntu and Chrome browser). It’s very slick and could certainly mean a new page for synchronous, open source educational tools that integrate into Moodle.
Did I mention that there’s already a Moodle plugin? [http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=3524]
Will you make the switch?
LikeSpecial Summer Series: Hosting – @Moodleshare
Part eight of our Special Summer Series on free hosting services (this is the 2nd to last hosting highlight).
Moodleshare originally was a social sharing site where you could post information about open Moodle courses and sites so that other Moodlers could find them and the community could grow from the experience. The original site is still active and available at http://moodleshare.com/. According to the hosting site, Moodleshare
will host your courses for you if you are unable to grant guest access through your school or organization.
This site also hosts several open courses available to use in your own classroom or on your own Moodle install.
URL: http://courses.moodleshare.com/
Description: course sharing site and teacher testing ground
Ads?: no
3rd party plug-ins: no
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: NA
Business plan: NA
Limits: objectionable or large uploaded files may be removed/blocked
Basic Plan: one course, space available for open/shared courses
Update on the #Blackboard Acquisition and Moodle
Read our previous post on the Blackboard acquisition, including the invaluable comments, here: http://www.moodlenews.com/2010/what-the-blackboard-acquisition-means-for-moodle/
There’s an update from Blackboard on the public response to the Blackboard acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate from Ray Henderson, President of Blackboard Learn,
I love Elluminate/Wimba – but don’t use Blackboard for learning management. Will I have to use Bb in order to keep using Elluminate or Wimba?
I want to underline the answer to this one: we want to support educational collaboration wherever it occurs, and regardless of LMS. To that end, we’ll support current integrations for Elluminate and Wimba with all the major LMS providers. For open source, that’s largely in our own control. For commercial providers we’ll need their partnership, but I’ve already reached out to some in this arena and am optimistic about this potential. I know that some still doubt our commitment here, but I can only say it’s real and that I’ll be happy for us to be judged on our actions in this regard. [link]
So it appears that Blackboard will continue to develop and support Wimba/Elluminate integrations into Moodle and will post the plug-ins (hopefully) into the plug-in repository at Moodle.org. Though, as Ray says, they’ll need to be judged on their actions in this regard.
- Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com/
- Wimba http://www.wimba.com/
- Blackboard http://blackboard.com/
More on @moodledan’s Customizable Edumoodle 2.0 theme
I’m digging Dan Humpherson’s (@moodledan) EduMoodle theme for Moodle 2.0 more and more as I see it’s customization interface. Check out these two videos that highlight you can both easily change the color theme to fit your needs and change the logo.
COOL.
Vote for the theme: http://newschoollearning.com/theme/submissions/
Change the color scheme: http://vl3.co.uk/player/edumoodle.html
Change the logo: http://vl3.co.uk/player/edumoodlelogo.html
Download the theme: http://newschoollearning.com/theme/submissions/edumoodle/
See the theme in action: http://www.newschoollearning.com/moodle2/?&theme=edumoodle
Special Summer Special: Hosting – GlobalClassroom
Part seven of our Special Summer Series on free hosting services (two more days left!).
Today I’m going to cover (I hope without bias) GlobalClassroom.us, where I cut my teeth on Moodle in 2007. GlobalClassroom provides hosting and hosting services to Moodlers and teachers looking for online classroom solutions. It’s been through several iterations (1.0, beta, 2.0, and now “Cirrus”) which all provide a unique twist on Moodle hosting in that,
- teachers can create and delete their own courses
- all users enter the system to their personal “portfolio” page. Similar to myMoodle
- 1-code base with a layer of individual, brand-able, separate networks provide differentiation between schools
- telephone and email support.
While at GlobalClassroom I worked to provide Moodle throughout Pennsylvania, California and Vermont (while living in each state from 2007-2010) where I participated in local tech-conferences like CUE [http://cue.org] and Vermont Fest [http://www.vita-learn.org/]. Over that time we started hosting lots of school districts and even Pittsburgh Public Schools [http://www.pps.k12.pa.us]; and as I grew more and more comfortable with Moodle I provided phone and email support to users with questions, school-based training sessions and self-paced tutorials to learn about and see Moodle in action.
GlobalClassroom was a great experience and I left in February 2010. It still offers basic free hosting of Moodle (though you won’t find it in name on the site), registration is available at this link: http://www.globalclassroom.us/static/register
You’ll also find my original Moodle blog (focused on the GlobalClassroom flavor), http://theglobalclassroom.blogspot.com/.
URL: http://www.globalclassroom.us/
Description: network based Moodle community
Ads?: no
3rd party plug-ins: no
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: phone, email, tutorials and self-serve
Business plan: Freemium
Limits: no, students must self-register unless an eSchool is created (then they may be uploaded in bulk)
Basic Plan: teachers may created unlimited courses
@Moodleman “Always make sure your Moodle engages the audience”
The thing that everyone should do…is always make sure your Moodle sites engage our audience.
The quote in the title comes from the MoodleMayhem podcast by Diana Benner (@diben) and Miguel Guhlin (@mguhlin) who recently interviewed Julian Ridden (@moodleman). It occurs at about 25 minutes and is a great message about theming your Moodle site to engage the students. This might speak to Julian’s graphic design background, but it’s a telling quote about allowing the students to own their educational site. A prime example is a site that Julian’s worked on, http://quantum.riverview.nsw.edu.au/.
Note that the Wood and Metal theme will not be included in the Moodle 2.0 core. :D
Go listen to the whole podcast (download it here) for all sorts of other goodies.
Related:
- MoodleMayhem podcast: http://sites.google.com/site/moodlemayhem/project-updates/podcast3-julianridden
- Julian’s Theme tutorial: http://www.moodleman.net/archives/40
- Miguel’s post with lots of Moodleman links: http://www.mguhlin.org/2010/07/moodle-mayhem-podcast-3-interview-with.html
Workshop 2.0 by @markdrechsler #mootau10
Here’s a cool preso from Mark Drechsler (@markdrechsler) that gets into the revamped Moodle Workshop 2.0 activity (slides 16-19).
Read more about it and the presentation given at Moodle Moot Australia 2010: http://www.markdrechsler.com/?p=225
Pretty slick.
Special Summer Series: Hosting – e-Socrates.org
Part six of our Special Summer Series on free hosting services.
Today we’re going to talk about one of the most progressive hosting initiatives, e-Socrates, “free Moodle hosting with ethics”. Though a simple idea, e-Socrates is Italy’s premier hosting community where in exchange for support, hosting and a Moodle classroom of your own you need only share your content with the world. e-Socrates’ goal is to create a totally open educational platform where learners from any where can peek in and benefit from your educational materials.
A nod to a forefather of the intellectual age, the site says,
…as you may know we strongly believe that knowledge is a whole humanity’s heritage (that’s why we created the e-Socrates.org community). When you create a course within e-Socrates you always allow website visitors the right to read your contents, you can prevent them from subscribing as students but you can’t prevent them from accessing the material. This is the only “fee” we ask teachers in change of the free hosting service.
URL: http://e-socrates.org
Description: Open Educational Community based in Moodle
Ads?: yes
3rd party plug-ins: no
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: community forums (English and Italian)
Business plan: the company behind the hosting service has shut it’s doors but an former member of the company has taken charge of e-Socrates.org and hosting continues unchanged though new course requests have been temporarily suspended.
Limits: no
Basic Plan: 1 course
Moodle Mayhem on Classroom 2.0 Live (7/17) with @mguhlin and @diben
Classroom 2.0 Live, an ongoing educational webinar, is hosting Diana Benner (@diben) and Miguel Guhlin (@mguhlin) this week on July 17th to talk about MoodleMayhem [http://sites.google.com/site/moodlemayhem/]. These educational events are free and open to the public.
Date: Saturday July 17th
Time: 12 noon EST
Who: the curators of MoodleMayhem
Where: http://tinyurl.com/cr20live (an Elluminate session)
#MootAu10 is happening now
The 2010 Austrailian Moot (the largest ever down under) is happening today (through Wednesday). Follow developments on Twitter at #MootAU10 or check out the frequent posts by Tom Worthington (@tom_worthington) at NetTraveller (well worth the visit for Moodle content regardless).
More at http://moodlemoot.org.au/
More Moot AU 10 coverage:
