What it is
BigBlueButton is an open-source web conferencing system built for virtual classes, described by its maintainers as an open-source virtual classroom designed to help teachers teach and learners learn. It lives in the JavaScript ecosystem and is distributed under the LGPL-3.0 license. The project has been developed for roughly sixteen years, carries 9,215 stars and 5,978 forks on GitHub, and its latest release is BigBlueButton 3.0. It supports real-time sharing of audio, video, slides with whiteboard annotations, chat, and screen, and it ships with GreenLight as its default front-end.
The concrete problem it solves is the gap between a plain video call and an actual teaching session. A remote instructor needs more than a camera feed: BigBlueButton lets instructors engage remote students with polling, emojis, multi-user whiteboards, shared notes, and breakout rooms, and it generates analytics during the session that moderators can read in the Learning Analytics Dashboard. Presenters can record and play back content for later sharing. The README frames the design around online learning while noting the system can serve many other applications as well.
Key capabilities
- Real-time sharing of audio, video, slides with whiteboard annotations, chat, and screen.
- Polling, emojis, multi-user whiteboards, shared notes, and breakout rooms for student engagement.
- Learning Analytics Dashboard that surfaces session analytics to moderators during the session.
- Recording and playback of session content for later sharing.
- GreenLight, the default front-end shipped with the project.
- A documented API covering architecture, features, and integration.
- WebRTC-based conferencing, as reflected in the project topic list.
Who uses it and how
- Online tutoring, in a one-to-one format between a tutor and a single learner.
- Flipped classrooms, where instructors record content ahead of the live session.
- Group collaboration, in a many-to-many arrangement among participants.
- Online classes, in a one-to-many arrangement led by an instructor.
- Integrators who build on the API and the GreenLight front-end rather than the raw server.
Getting started
BigBlueButton 3.0 installs on Ubuntu 22.04 using bbb-install.sh, which the README states completes within 30 minutes. Full technical documentation, including architecture, features, API, and GreenLight, is published at docs.bigbluebutton.org.
When to use it — and when not to
The
project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline
BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton is an open-source virtual classroom designed to help teachers teach and learners learn.
BigBlueButton supports real-time sharing of audio, video, slides (with whiteboard annotations), chat, and the screen. Instructors can engage remote students with polling, emojis, multi-user whiteboards, shared notes, and breakout rooms. During the session, BigBlueButton generates analytics that are visible to moderators in the Learning Analytics Dashboard.
Presenters can record and playback content for later sharing with others.
We designed BigBlueButton for online learning, it can be used for many other applications as well. The educational use cases for BigBlueButton are
- Online tutoring (one-to-one)
- Flipped classrooms (recording content ahead of your session)
- Group collaboration (many-to-many)
- Online classes (one-to-many)
The latest version is BigBlueButton 3.0. You can install BigBlueButton it on Ubuntu 22.04 using bbb-install.sh within 30 minutes (or your money back 😉).
For full technical documentation of BigBlueButton -- including architecture, features, API, and GreenLight (the default front-end) -- see https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/.
BigBlueButton and the BigBlueButton Logo are trademarks of BigBlueButton Inc.