Stephen J. Pintauro, Ph.D., Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences, wrote:
I would like to try using BigBlueButton in my NFS 243 (Advanced Nutrition) class this semester. I mostly want to have my TA try it as a way of holding regular “help sessions” for the class. I set up a meeting on the BigBlueButton@uvm website and watched the tutorials. It all looks very straightforward. Once I login, I can enter my NFS 243 meeting as a moderator. But how do I add my TA as a moderator?
Wow. Good question.
As of now, they’ll have to use the Guest Moderator password.
The canned Drupal Module for BBB did not anticipate this scenario: only ‘moderate my own meetings’ and ‘moderate ALL meetings.’ I have done a lot of hacking at this module, so it me be possible for me to add something like an “additional moderators” field — but certainly not before classes start.
While exploring this option, I also discovered a misconfiguration in the “restrict to netIDs’ feature. It wasn’t restricting. Now, I think it is.
More recently, I tested audio connections with our own Justin Henry. We were first stymied by bad UVM/New England internet failures. Next day, network problems abated, but Justin, while audible, kept going silent until he toggled his mike off and on . Today, I tested with Dr. Vickie Backus, from her home in Starksboro, VT. Audio performance was flawless over the course of several hours. Something’s hosed on Justin’s end.
Later, Gary Atwood Library Assistant Professor Dana Medical Library penned:
I had never heard of BBB, but it certainly seems like a pretty cool product. I would love to come over and meet with you for a little tour/demo if you have some time. Just let me know of a day/time that works for you.
It might help if you know a little bit more about where I’m coming from. One of the groups that I’m supposed to work with are our medical students who are out on clinical rotation at 3 different hospitals in Maine, Connecticut, and Florida. Obviously, these folks can’t come to the library to sit in on any workshops that we have to offer so I’m trying to find a way to reach out to them and web conferencing seems to be the way to go. I have a small amount of experience running webinars from my former position, but I’m no expert (although I’d like to become one).
So, what this all means is that the webinars that I’m looking to offer this spring are really big experiments. I don’t even know if I’ll have anyone sign up, but I’m looking at offering two different ones. One would be very PowerPoint oriented and the other would be more sharing-my-browser oriented. Just to be on the safe side, I’d probably cap registration at 6-10 people because I’ll be the only person running this and will have to keep track of chat and monitor tech issues.
I don’t know if that helps you or not, but as I said, I’d love to learn more about this if you have some time.
He came over, we talked and demoed, with help from Dr. Backus in Starksboro. Gary is hooked.
Finally, Steve Exler, EPSCoR reports they are having their 2nd BBB webinar on January 22nd at 2:45
