Ask an you will receive. Two days ago I posted about discovering BigBlueButton and wondered if there was a way to integrate it into Moodle. Yep, there is. Thanks to Luc, Fred, and Denis who were kind enough to post in the comments where I could find one.

The eLearning company Dual Code makes a GPLed module that connects Moodle to your BigBlueButton server. Once it is installed things are simple. A teacher can add a BigBlueButton assignment that will create a room on the BigBlueButton server.

BigBlueButton Assignment. It's that easy.

Just fill out the information and you are good to go.

Once the teacher has created the room students will be able to enter it by clicking on the assignment under Moodle. The room will be closed until a moderator enters the room. This is great to make sure there is always someone there for the students and so students can’t accidently go in as a moderator.

Setting it up on your Moodle server.

1. Download the plug-in from http://www.dualcode.com/bigbluebutton/
2. Unzip the directory and you will find two folders: lang and mod
3. In the mod folder you will find a folder called bigbluebutton. As an adminstrator put this folder into the mod directory of your Moodle server. It is at the top level of your Moodle directory. This provides the functionality of the module.
4. In the lang folder you will find a folder called en_utf8. In that folder you will see a file called bigbluebutton.php. That file need to go to the same location on your Moodle server (yourmoodleinstall/lang/en_utf8/bigbluebutton.php). This provides the language files we need to make it work.
5. In the lang folder you will find a folder called en_utf8. In that folder you will see another folder called help. Open it an you will see a folder called bigbluebutton. Copy the folder to the same location on your server (yourmoodleinstall/lang/en_utf8/help/bigbluebutton). This provide the help files when you click on a question mark in Moodle.
6. Login as administrator and go to Notifications. Moodle will detect the module and take care of everything else.
7. Go to Modules > Activities > Manage Activities. You can click the eye to give teachers access to BigBlueButton.
8. Click Settings beside BigBlueButton. We need to tell Moodle a few things about our BigBlueButton server.
9. Make sure you click the “I am hosting my own BigBlueButton Server”
10. Input the IP address of your BigBlueButton server.
11. Input the Security Salt from your BigBlueButton server. You can find this in a file called “bigblueutton.properties” on your BigBlueButton server. On my Ubuntu server I found it at /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/bigbluebutton/WEB-INF/classes/bigbluebutton.properties. The security salt string you are looking for can be found after beans.dynamicConferenceService.securitySalt=your_number_here. Input that long string of numbers and letter to the field in Moodle.
12. Put a star in the Meeting IDs field. That will allow an unlimited number of rooms be created. You can also put any number here to restrict how many rooms on your BigBlueButton server you want going at one time. This can be helpful for performance issues.
13. You should now be able to start a room by choosing it as an assignment.

Have fun out there folks.

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