The primary purpose of Zoom is online meetings, whereas the primary purpose of BigBlueButton is online teaching.
Hence BigBlueButton focuses on providing features for students engagement during the class and analytics from the classes to assess and evaluate students.
Here are some key differentiators that make BigBlueButton better than Zoom for online classes.
#1 Class Analytics
For each online class on BigBlueButton, you have the following data-points to gauge student engagement, enabling teachers to assign marks for class participations similar to in-person classes:- How many students joined
- At what time each student joined and left; Also shows if a student joined and left multiple times.
- Public chat messages of students
- Who use Raise hand feature to ask questions during the class
- Who answered and what they answered for poll questions that a teacher may ask
#2 Student Engagement
You have following tools to engage your students during the class:- Poll: You can be creative in using polling. For example, you can ask a question that students will answer over a poll. Or, you can display quiz questions on the slide and students can answer over the poll. Refer to Class Analytics above, you will precisely know who is answering and what he is answering to grade students, if you want to.
- Private chat: This is great to create the real class environment. Students love to chat with their peers. This is far better than letting students browse social network sites on the other browser tabs. As a student, we all used to cross-talk during the class. Mimicking the same in the online class, give your students reasons to attend your classes. Private chats are not available in Class Analytics.
- Multi-sharing white-board: You can ask your students to join you in discussing some specific points by drawing/writing on the white board.
- Other tools: public chat, raise hand, slides, screen sharing, audio/video chat are common as Zoom.
#3 Data Privacy
- Data privacy has been a big concern for Zoom (selling data to Facebook, Zoombombing). Though Zoom has taken some steps in recent days to mitigate such issues, please do remember that Zoom, like any other listed company, is always working towards meeting analysts expectations and optimizing shareholder returns. Nothing wrong in that. But let’s be clear that selling user data for advertising revenue from Facebook was not a software bug but a well-thought strategy to maximize revenue-per-user.
- BBB, being an open-source project, has no such revenue-per-user maximizing motive. First and foremost, the entire source code is available for anyone to inspect, find bugs and make changes. Second, you can install BBB on your own server and take full control of your data.