[AusNOG] My condolences to the people trying to sort out remote learning

[James Andrewartha]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2020, Bill Woodcock wrote:

> FWIW, I’ve been looking at a lot of the options, and I know a lot of other people who have as well, for various school districts and universities, and the best option (mainly from a not-exposing-children-to-malware-and-naked-Nazi-zoombombers perspective) is BigBlueButton.  It’s open-source, well-supported, and runs entirely sandboxed in the browser, HTML5, like Jitsi, but with an online-classroom focus rather than a business-meeting focus.
> 
> https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton
> 
> That said, I’m not trying to use it in production myself.  Friends who are say it’s mostly great, but the audio quality isn’t as good as some of the commercial options.  Which isn’t surprising.  Audio noise cancellation is the subject of a million patents, and patent-trolls.

As mentioned previously we're running BBB in production, although right 
now it's school	holidays. There's interesting comments on audio quality in 
https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/7007 which I haven't 
had time to dive in to. Our music teachers mostly complain that the audio 
cuts out during loud or staccato periods.

And thanks Rob for the kind words. Our go live for remote learning was a 
few weeks ago, and despite several tests 4 separate components fell over 
due to excess load. It was a stressful morning alright, but I sat back, 
took a breath and worked on them one-by-one and everything was running 
smoothly within a day, and now the teachers are loving it.

Thanks,

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