RecordingsBN

The RecordingsBN module is a contributed plugin written by Blindside Networks that works as a resource for a course. It allows presenting users and instructors a list of playback recordings related to the course which were previously created using a BigBlueButton server and the BigBlueButtonBN activities in the course.

RecordingsBN is part of the LMS BigBlueButton set and complements BigBlueButtonBN to provide with all the features required in order to take advantage of the new capabilities offered by a BigBlueButton server version 0.80 (and later).

Contents

Features

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for distance education. The goal of the project is to enable universities, colleges, and K12 to delivery a high-quality learning experience to remote users.

BigBlueButton supports real-time sharing of slides (PDF and any document readable by OpenOffice), webcams, whiteboard, chat, voice over IP (using FreeSWITCH), and presenter’s desktop. It can record and playback sessions (slides, audio, and chat), runs on Mac, Unix, and PC clients, and is supported by a community of developers that care about good design and a streamlined user experience.

With this plugin, you can

• Instructors and administrators can add a resource in any class to access and manage recorded lectures
• Instructors can publish, unpublish and delete recordings as part of the management of recorded lectures
• Users can access recorded lectures through the list of recordings offered by the resource

Requirements

You need:

• A server running current version of LMS
• A BigBlueButton 0.80 (or later) server running on a separate server (not on the same server as your LMS site)
• The latest version of BigBlueButtonBN Activity Module installed and configured.
• The latest version of RecordingsBN Module

Installation

These instructions assume your LMS server is installed at /var/www/lms.

• Copy zip file you downloaded to /var/www/lms/mod

cp recordingsbn.zip /var/www/lms/mod

• Enter the following commands

cd /var/www/lms/mod 
sudo unzip recordingsbn.zip

This will create the directory

./recordingsbn

• Login to your lms site as administrator

LMS will detect the new module and prompt you to Upgrade.

• Click the ‘Upgrade’ button.

The activity module will install recordingsbn.

• Click the ‘Continue’ button.

At this point, you can enter any course, turn editing on, and add a RecordingsBN activity link to the class.

Note: You must to have BigBlueButtonBN installed to actually manage meetings and to create recordings as well.

You can find a video overview of installing and using bigbluebuttonbn and recordingsbn, at http://www.blindsidenetworks.com/integrations/lms/

FAQ

More Information

An important change was introduced to the UI on 1.0.9-rc1. The table that used to be a standard HTML one is now a dynamically created javascript one based on the standard YUI library included in LMS, plus the contributed YUI plugins Datatable Paginator and Paginator View. The main advantage this change brings is the ability to order columns and paginate the results when there is a big number of recordings.

There are however two potential problems associated with this new interface. The first is the possibility of experiencing javascript clashes due the version of the libraries loaded when LMS has another Plugin making use of the same YUI plugin. And the second is the possibility of the user having the javascript disabled in the browser. In this two cases the plugin will show a white page.

In these cases what an administrator can do is uncomment the line 254 in the view.php file

   //echo html_writer::table($table)."n";

And comment the 4 lines related to the javascript rendering (256-259).

echo ‘

‘.”n”;

Also, the YUI plugins don’t support Unicode, so, for those using LMS with a language that requires Unicode characters the YUI view could not work. Administrators should apply the same change suggested.