During this COVID-19 outbreak I find myself wanting to recommend Open edX to teachers, educators, schools and universities who need to move teaching outside of the classroom. However, I do not know of any good live video conferencing solution that would work out of the box on Open edX. I searched Slack, the (now defunct) mailing list and these discussion forums; I found many people asking about that feature, but there was no satisfying answer.
Did I miss something? Would you be interested in that feature? If yes, would you be willing to sponsor its development?
Open edX does not have a native conferencing tool. So, I recommend integrating a fully-featured web conferencing solution instead. There are a ton out there (Hangouts meet, Zoom, Webex, etc.) which can be used for the livestream, group meetings, or breakouts depending on the needs of a class.
From personal experience, an LTI integration with Zoom will let you add a schedule block in an edX course. Check with the service provider on whether your institutional license covers this kind of usage.
EDIT: Similar to the complexity of a video pipeline, this is unlikely to be an out-of-the-box feature on Open edX.
Thatās just great @bpedx I managed to setup Zoom LTI Pro, created an LTI Xblock on my Open edX platform and scheduled a meeting. It just works! Iāll proceed to creating a video tutorial, if I find the time.
I had a look at BigBlueButton but did not realize either that it was LTI-compatible. @MHaton Do you run BBB on premises or do you use an instance hosted elsewhere? Is it working well?
Iāve only personally used it with the demo they gave us access to But weāve referred people to hosted BBB SaaS providers previously like Blindside networks - we donāt typically get into the business of maintaining a billion other SaaS solutions, lord knows Open edX is enough to handle.
@Diljith I didnāt have much trouble setting it up but I had to dig in the source code of the lti_consumer xblock. Iām planning on publishing a tutorial or video in the coming days. Unless youāre in a hurry?
Just in case itās helpful, we have this general guide on using the LTI Consumer XBlock, although it is written to work with the version of it weāre running on Tahoe. Regardless:
Thank you Ben. I had a question in a separate thread on AR/VR integration. Is that an area you are familiar with, as well? Thanks for the support in advance.
Does Open EdX support live/virtual classes delivered by teachers to varying sizes of students?
What are the features that are available for the instructor in such a live/virtual class?
Hey everybody and thanks to @regis for opening this thread
working on integration of Open edX and BBB I found this video from appsembler which is exactly what I need. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByV95k8r8-A
So I want to know that did you customize lti_consumer xblock to achieve this functionality? if you didnāt and itās just about configuration, can I ask you to kindly guide me about how can I have the meeting recordings back in my LMS course page?
Hello Mahyard.
You do need to customize the lti_xblock, because the standard version will not share all the learner information that is needed on the big blue button side.
here is a link to the PR we did in eduNEXT to make the change.
I managed to setup Zoom LTI Pro, created an LTI Xblock on my Open edX platform and scheduled a meeting. It just works! Iāll proceed to creating a video tutorial, if I find the time.
But weāve referred people to hosted BBB SaaS providers previously like Blindside networks - we donāt typically get into the business of maintaining a billion other SaaS solutions, lord knows Open edX is enough to handle.