Daily Post September 12 2025
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BigBlueButton
This is a purpose-built virtual classroom software for teachers and learners through an interactive online learning environment. The software was developed in 2007 by the Technology Innovation Management (TIM) program at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. It is tailor-made to support online education with features that extend past typical web conferencing platforms, enabling educators to deliver classes, hold office hours, and facilitate collaborative group work effectively.
Features
Educators can upload various document types such as PowerPoint, Word, PDF, and images, then use a virtual whiteboard for annotations and highlighting key content. The whiteboard supports multi-user interaction, allowing multiple participants to collaborate in real time. Screen sharing enables teachers to demonstrate workflows or materials directly from their computers, while video sharing options permit playing external videos during sessions. Breakout rooms facilitate small-group discussions or closer student collaboration, promoting active engagement in ways that mimic physical classroom interactions.
Additional tools include real-time polling to gauge student understanding, a chat system supporting both public and private messaging, usage of emojis, hand-raising functions to request attention, shared notes for group work, and session recording for later playback. Teachers can also leverage built-in learning analytics dashboards to monitor participation, including visibility into who is online, talking, or using interactive tools, which helps identify students who might need extra support.
Open Source Licensing and Self-Hosting
The source code is fully open source and hosted on GitHub, licensed primarily under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). This licensing arrangement permits users to freely use, modify, and integrate BigBlueButton into their educational or commercial applications, provided they comply with LGPL terms. This means that organizations can run BigBlueButton on their own infrastructure or customize the software without restrictions on their educational or commercial use, providing an open ecosystem of development and contribution. The trademark and branding, including the BigBlueButton name and logo, are protected separately and come with guidelines for commercial use to maintain brand integrity.
It is self-hosted. Organizations such as schools, NGOs, or small businesses can install and operate their own instances of BigBlueButton on private servers or cloud infrastructure. This self-hosting option allows complete control over data privacy, security, and customization, which is particularly valuable for entities that need to comply with data protection policies or prefer to avoid dependency on third-party hosted conferencing solutions.
Benefits for Small Businesses, NGOs, and Schools
For small businesses, NGOs, and educational institutions, BigBlueButton is a cost-effective, flexible, and feature-rich platform for remote communication and learning. Being open source and self-hosted, it removes licensing fees that can be prohibitive for smaller organizations while allowing full control over deployment and data.
Educational institutions benefit from it’s teaching tools that support synchronous learning, student engagement, and collaboration. Additionally the integration with popular Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Canvas, and Sakai simplifies workflows for educators by embedding virtual classroom functionality directly into familiar educational platforms. This integration supports hundreds of languages and millions of users daily worldwide.
NGOs and small businesses can use BigBlueButton for training, webinars, and team collaboration that require interactive participation. The breakout rooms, polling, shared notes, and whiteboard features enhance engagement and effective communication even in distributed teams or community outreach activities. The security features such as role-based access control, password-protected rooms, and end-to-end encryption help safeguard sensitive discussions and data.
This may not fit every scenario in a business but it is a good tool to work with. https://bigbluebutton.org/