- Latest News
- Help Links
- About BigBlueButton
- Welcome to your built-in Virtual Classroom
- Integration
- Engagement
- Student
- Teacher
- Analytics
- More Information
- Accessibility
- Data retention policy
- Privacy
- Integration Instructions
Latest News
2024-01-27 - We have released two new versions last year, which introduced an entirely new whiteboard and more ways to pull data back from the breakout rooms.
BigBlueButton 2.7 new methods for collaborating with breakout rooms (Nov 2023)
BigBlueButton 2.6 new whiteboard (March 2023)
2022-03-07 - We have released a newer version of BigBlueButton that now contains the Learning Analytics Dashboard, a live dashboard available within BigBlueButton that helps instructors track
- Who is attending?
- Who is engaged?
- Who is learning (based on responses to polls)?
For an overview of new features, see
2021-10-07 - For courses with Sections and Groups, you can how easily select specific Sections or Groups who have access to the conference (see video of how this works).
Help Links
About BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton virtual classroom that has been available as part of your Canvas subscription since 2014. Today, over 1,000 Canvas customers use conferences for their virtual classes.
Conferences come in two versions: Free Tier (part of your Canvas subscription) and Premium Tier (available as an upgrade).
In the Free Tier, recordings expire after 7 days. The Free Tier is scalable up to 10 concurrent sessions and 25 users per sessions. If you need more, we recommend looking closely at upgrading to the Premium Tier.
The Premium Tier gives you permanent recordings, integration with Canvas Studio, classroom analytics, and more. On the Premium Tier, sessions can have up to 100 users, and we can scale to as many concurrent sessions as you need: we have some schools running just a few concurrent sessions, and others running over 5,000 concurrent sessions.
Upgrading to the Premium Tier is easy as well: contact your Canvas Representative for pricing and upgrades.
Welcome to your built-in Virtual Classroom
BigBlueButton is the web conferencing system designed for one market: Online Learning.
We focus on three areas: Integration, Engagement, and Analytics.
Integration
It’s easy for your students to join a conference: it’s a single click within the course. There is no plugin required, nor any need to login to an external application.
After the conference is over, the recordings are visible within Canvas.
As an instructor, after a recorded class finishes, you will receive a notification from Canvas when the recording is ready for you and your students to view.
Engagement
BigBlueButton has all the standard features that you would expect, plus many more which are focused on enabling you to engage your students.
- Multi-user whiteboard
- Breakout rooms
- Chat (public and private)
- Polling
- Shared notes
Looking for a list of all these features? The following articles in the Canvas knowledge base contain more details:
The two videos below walk you through how students and teachers can use BigBlueButton.
Student
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw3Ajuy3kyk
Teacher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz9SUisurrA
Visit https://bigbluebutton.org/videos for more tutorial videos.
Analytics
Interested to know which students participated in the conference? For every recorded session, the Instructor will get an additional recording format called Statistics.
This format gives you a high level overview of the conference including it’s duration, number of students and number of moderators present.
You can also review detailed information by student. Look at all students at once or dive into each student's specific data. Here is a short video of what the Statistics feature provides.
More Information
Accessibility
We are WCAG 2.0 AA (with exceptions). For a full report (including our VPAT) see accessibility.
Security
Privacy
Integration Instructions
If you are looking for installation instructions, we must disappoint you. BigBlueButton is built-into Canavs as Canvas Conferences. You already have it - there is nothing for you to install.
