Hi all,
We recently discovered that students were having trouble joining bigbluebutton conferences in scenarios where they had arrived at the #conferences page of the course before the instructor had "Started" the conference by clicking the "Start" button (which is only visible to the instructor). The student's view of the page looked like this:
The student can see that the conference ("Test Conference") exists, but they cannot join it because the "Join" button doesn't appear until the instructor "starts" the conference. By contrast, if the conference has been started by the instructor, the screen would look like this:
This, of course, is all by design and appropriate functionality. However, the student might (and does) become disoriented since there is no guidance as to what to do or why they cannot join. In fact, the student would need to manually refresh the browser window to see the Join button if the instructor started the conference after the student arrived.
I feel like a simple solution would be for Canvas to display something along the lines of: "This conference has not yet been started by the moderator. Please refresh this page when the conference is scheduled to begin."
I'd appreciate feedback on this concept.
Michael Keen
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