I’ve been playing around with using Big Blue Button [1] while teaching my PHY1308 introductory physics course. I used it for virtual office hours during the Dallas ice storm. For the past few weeks, whenever I setup for actual class I also log into my virtual classroom as the moderator, upload my slides, and use WebCamStudio [2] to create a virtual camera device that allows me to switch between my laptop camera (for the blackboard) and an external camera (for demonstration equipment viewing). Essentially, I have an open source TV studio in my classroom.
On Thursday, I had my first attendee: my father! He had expressed interest in seeing how BBB worked in the teaching environment. After seeing me on camera, he entered into the chat window, “Get a haircut!” Oh, parents.
Ribbing aside, my father reported an excellent experience with the class. The sound of my lecturing was good, though he couldn’t hear student questions. I hadn’t been able to bring my conferencing microphone to class that day, so I had to rely purely on the built-in mic on the laptop. Considering that, I’m impressed my own lecture sound quality was good enough. The switching of the video was good, he told me. It was hard for him to see everything I was doing at the board, but primarily that was because I can’t get a wide enough shot of my blackboard with my laptop camera. I’ve also noticed that my Quickcam Pro 9000 resolution is limited, I think by either the UVC driver in linux or WebCamStudio (I can’t track it down). Either way, it was a largely positive experience reported by my father. Now he wants a BBB appliance for his own classroom.
The next step is to try BBB with a more “volatile” situation to see how it reacts. This coming Monday, the department seminar (which was going to be a video seminar anyway) will use BBB. The speaker, from Michigan, will dial into the virtual seminar room and I’ll make him the presenter. At that point, he’ll be able to upload slides, share his desktop, etc. I’ll have a camera on the audience in the seminar room, and my proper conferencing microphone. I’ll report the experience here. But, given our recent bad experience with EVO for a similar video seminar (jerky video that couldn’t keep up with the speaker, audio devices randomly switching from external mic to internal mic) this will be an interesting contrast and another data point for the BBB portfolio.
[1] http://www.bigbluebutton.org/
