BigBlueButton’s Learning Dashboard Monitors Student Performance

Our standard BigBlueButton features allows  teachers control over who participates, webcam and microphone access, access to breakaway rooms and more. However, with numerous students in a class engaging in intense activity during a lesson, it can be challenging to keep track of who is in or out, what everyone is doing and how they are coping.

We hear you, and along with what we’ve learned about helping teachers deliver effective classes to their students, we understand that educators, too, can benefit from dashboards.  As a result, there is a new feature coming to BigBlueButton this fall: The Learning Dashboard.  

What is Our New Learning Dashboard feature?

It’s no surprise that online education poses several challenges. These include ensuring attendance, capturing and retaining attention, maintaining focus, and providing a teacher-student feedback loop for ongoing, meaningful engagement.

We’ve developed our learning dashboard to help educators effectively and efficiently ‘read the room’ to help them introduce flexible approaches tailored to individuals or groups. The detail included in the overview page allows the teacher to understand the extent to which each learner is in attendance, engaged and participating, and their understanding of content. 

Imagine you are teaching a class of 25 students. You are 45 minutes into your lecture and have been engaging the students. Some have raised their hands, some have chatted, and some have responded to your poll questions.  However, before starting the last 45 minutes, you are probably wondering:

• How long has each student been in the class?
• Which students have been actively participating (or not)?
• Are students in the course learning the content?

BigBlueButton will soon let you answer these questions (and more) with the Learning Dashboard.  The Learning Dashboard is a persistent view -- think of it as your teaching co-pilot -- that provides you with:

• User metrics that include time in class, talk time, webcam time, and number of chat and emojis -- including raised hands
• A participation score based on the above metrics
• Every student’s response to your polls 

Unlike other web conferencing systems that only give you a subset of this data after your class is over, BigBlueButton’s Learning Dashboard gives you live feedback on your student’s participation and learning during the live lesson.   

Here are two screenshots of the Learning Dashboard.

User Metrics: Online time, talk time, webcam time, messages, emojis, raised hands, participation score

Poll Results

Teachers can then initiate lines of questioning or probing to create increased engagement or elaboration of content to facilitate enhanced learning, consistently and reliably, and based on evidence. To activate or increase motivation, participation and understanding, you can introduce or switch methodologies or interact remedially with those less active or falling behind through private chat or messaging. 

This fall, the Learning Dashboard will be available to all teachers (both Free Tier and Premium Tier).  It’s an example of our commitment to improving teaching through deep integration with Canvas, focused on student engagement and rich analytics. 

How to Launch the Learning Dashboard 

Accessing the new BigBlueButton learning dashboard is easy; head to the gear icon to find your tools list and select “Learning Dashboard” to launch the feature.

Like the overall teaching platform, our learning dashboard remains under active development, meaning we will continue to update, tweak and improve the feature as it gets used and based on ongoing feedback from users. 

About BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton is a web conferencing system designed specifically for teachers and online learning.  We were born in the classroom, not the boardroom. Deeply integrated with Canvas since 2014 and with Canvas Blindside Networks, BigBlueButton has provided over 500,000,000 minutes of virtual classes to teachers globally.

Our free, education-specific online software solution can be plugged into your existing LMS or used as a standalone virtual classroom platform. In addition, our software is available globally in over 60 languages, helping teachers support learners via practical, innovative, virtual teaching tools. 
Your teacher’s co-pilot is coming soon to BigBlueButton. 

Come to our booth at InstructureCon 2021 to see a live demonstration of the Learning Dashboard, give us your feedback, and learn more about our commitment to helping your teachers deliver the most effective online classes.