Seneca’s open technology developers, working in collaboration with Blindside Networks, have made significant contributions to the development of the BigBlueButton platform for distance education.
Blindside Networks is an Ottawa-based company dedicated to helping universities, colleges and commercial companies deliver high-quality learning experiences to remote students. They do this by providing commercial support and hosting for BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing system for on-line learning.
“The mission of BigBlueButton is to ensure every student with a web browser has access to a high-quality on-line learning experience,” says Fred Dixon, CEO of Blindside Networks. “BigBlueButton is an open source project that has localizations in over 15 languages. The contributions from Seneca College are helping make this goal a reality for students world-wide.”
Using new technologies such as WebRTC, there are now HTML5 and mobile versions in development. In spite of the challenges working with technologies lacking established protocols, BigBlueButton is becoming an innovative and world-class platform for on-line learning that will allow users to join lectures and conferences through their smartphone or mobile tablets. The web conferencing system is already being used by over 50 organizations around the world in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Australia, and the U.K.
