Some members have expressed an interest in a shared learning space, something that complements the online meeting rooms we have, to organise courses or a “school” around it. While BigBlueButton was originally developed for online learning at schools and universities, it’s focus is on the synchronous part, of meeting, learning and working together in a classroom. The whiteboard, break-outs, collaborative pad, chat and user management are very practical features for that.
But online courses may need more, like a group or cohort of learners, that join a given course, discuss topics, find materials that are posted previously, check a calendar of activities and replay videos of classroom sessions - just to name a few. Depending on your initiative’s educational model you may have more needs.
BigBlueButton has been integrated with such more asynchronous learning oriented platforms, in particular with Moodle and CanvasLMS (official demo) but also with WordPress and other CMS’s (and I’m not mentioning the non-free systems out there).
Inside the meet.coop community we have member organisations with needs for an online learning space and others with experience in setting this up. This thread is to share thoughts about this, share knowledge and experiences and possibly to set up an online learning space complimentary to what we already have. All limited to the level of interest that we may have in this together.
- @freescholar mentioned they have set up CanvasLMS at Agaric and integrated that with BigBlueButton. It would be wonderful to learn from you!
- @petter from collective.tools also had an interest in that combination, correct?
- possibly Mayfirst.coop may have some services in this area for your members, @jamie? Movement education is a central commitment in MayFirst.
- the Free Knowledge Institute has been running Moodle for the Free Technology Academy for years with @dvdjaco, Marco Fioretti, @wouter. They’d be interested to see this happen at meet.coop and would like to use it for courses.
A rather concrete need is from the European Municipalist Network and CommonsPolis.org, who are preparing an online school programme for the movement. They’re members of meet.coop and are studying the options for their programme to go live in a few months from now. In the EMN School working group there are members from CommonsNetwork.org and from the ULEX Project, dedicated to high-quality trainings building social movement capacity for social justice and ecological integrity. A much aligned and interesting team.
The evolving Community programe in meet.coop is itself a learning project: not ‘a school’ or a delivery platform for content, more like an ongoing research & development community and an organised framework and protocol for collaboration in evolving ‘good practice’. It has the potential (and the intention) of becoming a kind of ‘college’ for the community of members of meet.coop, out there, actively developing the coop-commons world that is so urgently needed. See the draft of goals for the programme.
There will be more (member) orgs that could be interested in this. Please give a shout out here! (This is a wiki post - you can edit.) Let’s see who’d like to share experiences, discuss needs, and maybe test and imagine a shared service that could work for many of us.