Web conferencing plugins (including BigBlueButton)

We use Blackboard Collaborate Web Conferencing (formerly "Elluminate Live!", a solution with audio enabled breakout rooms. I did not contribute earlier, because our classroom solution is not open-source.

After Blackboard acquired Elluminate some years ago, the famous Moodle bridge plugin disappeared from Moodle Docs Plugin directory. The Elluminate trainer community did wait in vain, how Blackboard, (who is vendor of a commercial LMS also) will handle Elluminate´s Moodle connectivity in the future. Here are the good news:
Blackboard did continue to integrate the famous Elluminate engine, now named "Collaborate Web Conferencing" with many LMS (especially all those supporting the LTI standard). Collaborate´s user interface is improved from Elluminate´s plane cockpit GUI, The Java-based engine is still the same and does include audio-enabled breakout-rooms as usual

However, recording and playback of actions happening in several breakout rooms might be difficult to handle, several independant audio streams in parallel. It might be a better idea to define several rooms and let participant change the room for group work. This enables you to record each room independantly. Collaborate has a flatrate-like license model
limiting the number of seats, but not number of rooms driven in parallel.

The dedicated Collaborate-Moodle Integation is currently certified for Moodle up to 2.5x. I´m driving the Collaborate plugin v3.1 on my Moodle 2.6 - without glitches up to now.

Please note, that Collaborate´s Moodle plugin is distributed by vendor only and therefore not listed in the Moodle Docs plugin directory. I currently consider this as a conceptual bug of the Moodle Docs site disallowing any documentation about plugins not being distributed there.

Anyway I want to see open-source conferencing products based on WebRTC mature in terms of robust voIP audio recording, because clear speech is almost critical even in education.

Mero