Conference tool: system sound share facility

[r_rodriguez-gar]

We have started using  Conference (Bigbluebutton) for our foreign language online virtual classes. The tool is very versatile but it doesn't have the facility to share the system sound only the screen.

This would be extremely useful for our language sessions so we can share audios and videos with our students for our listening exercises.

Other systems such as Skype has this facility, is this is something that can be incorporated in Conference?

This idea has been developed and is available to Canvas users in Big Blue Button

For more information, please read Share an External Audio/Video Link — Blindside Networks Customer Support Portal 

[kmeeusen]

Hi r.rodriguez-garrido‌

I am going to share your question with  @ffdixon ‌, the CEO of Blindsides Network, the makers of BBB. He is a frequent visitor in this Community. I suspect that you will need the paid version of BBB to do this, though.

[ffdixon]

Hi Rosa,

I'm Fred Dixon, the product manager for BigBlueButton.  I work at Blindside Networks (the company that provides the hosting for BigBlueButton to Instructure).  While I can't speak on behalf on Instructure, I can answer all your BigBlueButton related questions.

> We have started using Conference (Bigbluebutton) for our foreign language online virtual classes. The tool is very versatile ...

Thanks!

> but it doesn't have the facility to share the system sound only the screen.

We are currently sending the audio and video through two different channels.  As the audio has it's own channel (which the user is prompted when joining the session), it is independent of the webcam/desktop sharing stream, and sharing a webcam/desktop does not broadcast audio.

The audio has built-in acrostic echo cancellation, which means that any audio that comes out of the speakers is echo cancelled (otherwise you'd get audio loop back).

There are a couple of workarounds.

1.  Have the students click a link to play the audio

If the link was to a public audio file, you could post the link in the chat and invite users to click it.  When the click, the link would open in a new tab and they could play it locally.

You can even embed links in the slides and those links are clickable when the slide is displayed.  

2.  Play the audio file out loud using a second computer.

If the instructor doesn't use a headset (but is in a quiet area), then BigBlueButton will use the built-in microphone.  It will pick up the instructor's voice *and* any other audio in the room.

If the instructor could trigger the audio file from a second source to play aloud, then BigBlueButton would pick up the audio (just as it does the instructors audio) and because it's coming from a different source, the acoustic echo cancellation would not kick in.

You can test this by simply logging into a BigBlueButton session and play a song on your phone.  Hold the phone up to your microphone and students will hear the song with out echo.

While we realize this isn't ideal, there is lot of echo cancellation going on to prevent audio from the internal speakers from looping back on the microphone.  The workarounds (1) and (2) circumvent that and let students hear an external audio source.

Regards,... Fred

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BigBlueButton Developer

[r_rodriguez-gar]

Dear Fred

Thank you very much for your quick response and suggestions.

Yes, we have already been asking students to click on the links from the Presentation (if they get stuck we have put the link in the chat) to listen and watch the videos, although it is a way round the problem, it is not the same than all students watching and listening at the same time. As sometimes tutors like to stop a video at certain time or part to talk about something, especially if they think that students are having difficulties understanding. There are also difficulties sharing MP3 recordings, we basically don’t use them anymore in our online classes.

Most of the tutors teach in the same room with noise cancelling headphones so we couldn’t have any videos playing loudly in the background.

If there is no solution, we’ll continue working like this. I just thought of asking as it would greatly enhance our language classes and students would have an even better experience.

Best wishes

Rosa

Rosa Rodríguez-Garrido

Lecturer in Spanish, Director of the Kingston Language Scheme (part-time)

[ffdixon]

> As sometimes tutors like to stop a video at certain time or part to talk about something, especially if they think that students are having difficulties understanding. There are also difficulties sharing MP3 recordings, we basically don’t use them anymore in our online classes.

Understood.  As we're running the the browser (no install), we're building upon the audio capabilities in the browser. FireFox and Chrome (and recently Safari 11) do an amazing job with WebRTC audio.  But, there are restrictions as we don't control the inputs/outputs for the audio.  The inputs are the default microphone (you can choose a microphone on FireFox), and the outputs are the default speaker.

For what it's worth, others have asked us for the same capability.  We want BigBlueButton to be application in all online classes, and we'll need to do more work for supporting the synchronized playback of audio files in the future.

Regards,... Fred

[Stef_retired]

Comments from Instructure

When a conference moderator shares an external video, audio from the video will play on each users' local system. 

For more information, please read through Share an External Audio/Video Link — Blindside Networks Customer Support Portal