This article covers the new features in BigBlueButton 2.5 released in August, 2022.
These features cover usability improves (such as changing time in breakout rooms), engagement improvements (such as allowing multiple responses to polls), and analytics improvements (such as the new timeline view for the Learning Analytics Dashboard).
Note: In BigBlueButton, the teacher has the role of moderator and students have the role of viewer.
Usability Improvements
Screenshot of current slide with annotations
To capture the current slide with annotations, you can now have BigBlueButton download PNG image of the current slide by choosing "Snapshot of current presentation".
Easier setup of breakout rooms
Breakout rooms remember your previous rooms assignments within the current session. This lets you re-use the existing breakout rooms.
Change time of breakout rooms
You can now easily change the duration of a breakout rooms to a new time.
When you change the duration of breakout rooms, BigBlueButton will notify each breakout room in the public chat of the new duration.
Webcam pinning
You can now pin a webcam so it always stays visible. This is useful if one of the webcams is showing sign language, for example, and you always want it to be visible.
Engagement
Text message broadcasting to breakout rooms
You can now broadcast a text message to all breakout rooms. This message will appear in the public chat of each breakout room.
Polling support for multiple answers per question
The Moderator can choose the option 'Allow multiple answers' which will enable the viewers to choose multiple responses to polls
Presenter View Student View
New Lock Setting - See other viewers cursors
When Locked, students can not see each other’s mouse in multi-user whiteboard.
This enables moderator to ask question such as “Where is Spain?", enable multi-user whiteboard, and easily see how many students give the correct answer with their mouse pointer.
In the above screen shot, the teacher sees all the mouse cursors, but students would only see their own cursor.
Analytics
Learning Analytics Dashboard improvements: Timeline view
The Timeline View shows a thumbnail of current slide and provides a visual representation of when users joined along with any emojis -- such as raise hands.
It shows exactly when the student shared emojis (including raise hand).
Individual Scorecard
Each student has an activity score (such as 4 out of 10). To see how the activity score is calculated, click the students name (shown as underlined)
and BigBlueButton shows a scorecard of how the activity score was calculated (in the screen shot below the activity score is 4).
Download data from Learning Analytics Dashboard
Moderators can click Download Session Data to download a .csv file of data from Learning Analytics Dashboard (including attendance).The .csv file can be opened in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, and anything that can read a comma separated file.
