BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton is a virtual classroom software program designed for online education. Accessed through a variety of Learning Management Systems, the application provides engagement tools and analytics for educators to interact with their students remotely. It is open source, except for some versions of its database software. History The project was started at Carleton University in 2007 by the Technology Innovation Management program. The first version was written by Richard Alam (it was initially called the Blindside project) under the supervision of Tony Bailetti. BigBlueButton is an affiliate member of the Open Source Initiative. The BigBlueButton name comes from the initial concept that starting a web conference should be as simple as pressing a metaphorical big blue button. In 2009 Richard Alam, Denis Zgonjanin, and Fred Dixon uploaded the BigBlueButton source code to Google Code and formed Blindside Networks, a company pursuing the traditional open source business model of providing paid support and services to the BigBlueButton community. In 2010 the core developers added a whiteboard for annotating the uploaded presentation. Jeremy Thomerson added an application programming interface (API) which the BigBlueButton community subsequently used to integrate with Sakai, WordPress, Moodle 1.9, Moodle 2.0, Joomla, Redmine, Drupal, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware,