BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton is a free software virtual classroom software program designed for online education. It is primarily accessed through Learning Management Systems, providing engagement tools and analytics which enable educators to interact with their students remotely.
History
The project was started at Carleton University in 2007 by the Technology Innovation Management program.The first version, initially referred to as the Blindside project, was written by Richard Alam under the supervision of Tony Bailetti. BigBlueButton is an affiliate member of the Open Source Initiative. The BigBlueButton name derives from the idea that starting a web conference should be as simple as "pressing a big blue button".
In 2009, Richard Alam, Denis Zgonjanin, and Fred Dixon uploaded the BigBlueButton source code to Google Code and formed Blindside Networks, a company pursuing the traditional open source business model of providing paid support and services to the BigBlueButton community.
In 2010, the core developers added a whiteboard for annotating the uploaded presentation. Jeremy Thomerson added an application programming interface which the BigBlueButton community subsequently used to integrate with Sakai, WordPress, Moodle 1.9, Moodle 2.0, Joomla, Redmine, Drupal, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Foswiki, and LAMS. Google accepted BigBlueButton into the 2010 Google Summer of Code program. To encourage contributions from others, the core developers moved the source code from Google Code to GitHub. The project indicated its intent of creating an independent, not-for-profit BigBlueButton Foundation to oversee future development.
In 2011, the core developers announced that they were adding record and playback capabilities to BigBlueButton 0.80.
In 2020, the project released BigBlueButton 2.2, a full rewrite of the client and server to support HTML5.
In March 2020, BigBlueButton 2.2 was awarded by the President of the ENTD, Pasquale Aiello, as the best web conferencing system and used in the project UNIOPEN, approved by the European Commission for Digital Skills and Job Coalition action plan.
In 2021, version 2.3 was released. In 2022, BigBlueButton was directly embedded into the Moodle 4.0 core, the largest Learning Management System. It also released two new updates that included BigBlueButton 2.4 in January and BigBlueButton 2.5 in late September. BigBlueButton used a freely licensed version of MongoDB for version 2.2, but unintentionally picked up MongoDB's nonfree license change in 2.3. BigBlueButton worked to remove MongoDB and as of 3.0 no longer uses MongoDB.
In 2025, BigBlueButton 3.0 was released. BigBlueButton continues to be used by organizations including the Ministry of National Education (France), the Air Education and Training Command, not-for-profits such as School on Wheels, and schools throughout the world for remote learning and teaching.