[ARCHIVED] Institutional Approaches for Student Video Projects

[mdthomas]

Salisbury University is researching methods in which other universities are taking for student video projects for class assignments.  Beyond this need for our traditional classrooms, we have online programs with individuals in various locations who have to collaborate on a presentation or a role-playing video assignment which is then made available to the faculty member and/or shared with other students for a grade.

Currently, we are using both the Panopto lecture capture system and their student dropbox as well as Conferences (BigBlueButton) within Canvas to such recordings.  Conferences has been ideal for our student in the online programs as they can collaborate in different locations and record their activity.  However, the limitation of the recording for 14 days is where we are now seeing problems.  We have a need to retain the recordings for longer, at least a year.  We are looking into the Premium Tier for BigBlueButton but are concerned about the functionality of going beyond the set number of concurrent synchronous sessions. 

Can anyone share their strategies at their university?  Are their other tools people are using?  If you subscribed to the Premium Tier for BigBlueButton, what happens if you have are subscribed for 2 concurrent sessions and a 3 virtual meeting occurs?  Is there any adverse affect to the conferences?

- Melissa

[prmjohnson]

Hi Melissa,

We only had two teachers piloting the extended recording feature in Conferences, so we only had one session running at one time. When I spoke to Fred at BigBlueButton, he said that they would run reports and if we did go beyond the 2 concurrent sessions, we would just adjust our pricing to match our usage. Based on that conversation, I wouldn't be concerned about someone not being able to access their meeting, etc. You may just want to double-check with Fred. I hope this helps!

[canvas_admin]

mdthomas, while I don't want to speak for BBB, I can relate our experience.  We just went through our first contract renewal and while we only pay for 1 concurrent session, there were a handful of times where we ended up having more than 1 concurrent session (one such time had like 3-4 concurrent sessions).  In our experience, they don't seem to have a hard and fast rule about the degree to which you can go over your concurrent sessions before needing to up the number of concurrent sessions on your contract. I think if you average out our sessions over the year's contract, we were probably at like 1.1 so we still remained at 1 concurrent session with our new contract.

I will say that there are many benefits to having the premium tier.  We're able to use BBB outside of Canvas as they give us rooms outside of Canvas. There's also a url where we can access a list of all of the saved recordings.  We also had an issue where we lost part of a recording and their support team was able to help us retrieve the entire recording (which was of a student's thesis presentation!). 

We are more than satisfied with our BBB experience and have had a wonderful time working with them. They are responsive, professional, and always looking to improve BBB features which just adds value to the product.

[mdthomas]

Mark,

Thank you so much for replying and sharing the experience.  Knowing this type of experience should help as we continue on our discussions on how to move forward.  It is greatly appreciated!

[canvas_admin]

My pleasure.  I'm always happen to champion quality products where we've had great experience and success; Canvas and BigBlueButton would be two of those.