Has any one evaluated the different cideo and white board conferencing plugins for moodle including big blue button AND others in. Terms of ...
A ease of setup
B price (bandwidth is off loaded to a third party service prover0
C usability in the real world of teaching with moodle?
There seem to be so many alternatives. Which one has got real traction?It’s a shame, however, the Google hangouts isn’t one of them? It’s a shame, however, the Google hangouts isn’t one of them?
Thanks
Dom
Big Blue Button is probably the most tightly integrated with Moodle. Self hosting any type of video or video conferencing is technically challenging.
AFAIK, Google Hangouts has been deprecated & will shut down next year.
One of the issues with developing & using integrations with Google's services is that they change things up &/or shut them down on a fairly regular basis. That's fine if you want to be on the bleeding edge of computer mediated communication but most organisations can afford nor are able to redesign a large number of courses & train staff to use new services when the one they're using is no longer available.
This is one reason why established companies who provide services under contracts, with known renewal dates are preferable in these cases. They usually provide Moodle integration plugins, e.g. https://moodle.org/plugins/?q=conference
Thanks Matt that’s very help undeee - I didn’t know hangouts was going - I wonder why
so does big blue have a self hosted option that’s free to use, or one of these increasingly adobe software-tax-rental things were you have to endlessly rent every month?
Re: hosting & managing your own web conferencing, AFAIK, & like Visvanath has said, it's more demanding than LAMP stack hosting. A media server has to run on "bare metal," i.e. a dedicated, physical server, not a VPS. They typically run on Java-based server software, e.g. Red5 runs on Apache Tomcat, & you need to know what you're doing in terms of configuring the server for your specific purposes, which is more involved than configuring a server for Moodle.
Even large publishing organisations like national news stations (e.g. BBC), newspapers, & television broadcasters often outsource media server hosting & management to 3rd parties.
Personally, I'd use a 3rd party service rather than try self-hosting.
Thanks Matt I understand will be moving or VPS installation over to an Amazon cloud running across three or 4M3 large servers with an elastic load balancer and elastic file storage (that’s the lingo I’m told!)
So I’m going to assume that it’s possible to instance some sort of video server that you mention their Matt but I wish I could get some idea of how much server demand-and thus how quickly we to go through Amazon Web services credit the big blue server option would be I guess the only way to find out is to set it up and then use the AWS Control Panel to see how much bandwidth is being drained by the BBB
I guess I’m just surprised that with the demise of Google hangouts, there aren’t any plug-ins that allow this to run off the backend of consumer services like Google hangouts?
Hi Dom,
Just to clarify, AFAIK, media servers can be glitchy on VPS'. They recommend actual physical servers, AKA "bare metal."
For the exact details of what you need in your own instance, I'd check with the media server support staff/forums, i.e. with people who know more about it than I do.
Web conferencing means streaming a lot of RTMP data at once (real time audio, video, text chat, screen sharing, shared whiteboard, etc.) so the load can be high.