[Building Sakai] Recording lectures with BigBlueButton

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to give everyone a brief update on the progress of the 
BigBlueButton project.

Record and playback has been the #1 requested feature for BigBlueButton 
since we released 0.71a in January, 2011.  I'm pleased to announce that 
after eight months of development, we released BigBlueButton 0.8-beta on 
September 12th, 2011.  BigBlueButton now records events (join, leave, 
who's talking, chat) and media (audio and presentations) in a session 
for later playback.  Those of you who attended the Sakai conference in 
LA would have seen a first-hand demonstration.   You can see an example 
of a short recording here

    
http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/playback/slides/playback.html?meetingId=238ff79fd66331a59274a8f3f05f1c0cd3e278b4-1315279293060

BigBlueButton 0.8 also offers improved audio (lower latency) and 
integration with Matterhorn (recording of webcam, desktop, and audio).   
See release notes for details:

    http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/ReleaseNotes.


One of our developers, Jesus Federico, and myself have been working on 
updating the BigBlueButton integrations.  We recently updated the Moodle 
plugin for BigBlueButton to fully use the record and playback APIs.

We're now working on the Sakai Meeting tool.   We've been in 
communication with Adrian Fish to coordinate our efforts.  Adrian has 
been pretty busy, so we're going to step up and do the necessary 
updates.  For the past two weeks, Jesus has made good progress.  See the 
following screen shots

Record option added to creating a meeting:
    http://www.bigbluebutton.org/sites/default/files/images/record1.png

Viewing a list of recording for a worksite
    http://www.bigbluebutton.org/sites/default/files/images/record2.png

Here's the list of requirements that we want to complete in updating the 
Sakai Meeting tool:

     When creating a meeting
     [   ] Add the option to record the meeting
     [   ] Add the ability to specify a custom welcome message
     [   ] Add the ability to specify that students must wait until a 
moderator joins

     When joining a meeting
     [   ] Implement to terminate a meeting (restricted to 
administrators and teachers)

     When viewing the list of recordings
     [   ] Show all the playback recordings related to a Site
     [   ] Publish and unpublish recordings (restricted to 
administrators and teachers)
     [   ] Delete recordings (restricted to administrators and teachers)


Our intent is to do as much of this work as possible, taking the burden 
off of Adrian's shoulders, and work with Adrian to review the code and 
make sure it can be committed.  You can follow our updates to the 
meeting tool at GitHub

    https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/bigbluebutton-sakai

If there are others in the Sakai community that would like to help 
review and test the updated meeting tool when its ready, we (and Adrian) 
would welcome the help.

Finally, I want to thank Scott Siddall at Longsight for his generous 
support in underwriting the effort to update the meeting tool.  With 
Scott's help, we're able to dedicated a full-time developer to the task.

Regards,... Fred

-- 
Fred Dixon
BigBlueButton Developer