Blindside Networks, the company that started the BigBlueButton project, and eThink Education, a certified Moodle Partner, announce a partnership to provide integrated hosting for BigBlueButton to all eThink Education customers.
“We’ve been impressed with the commercial-grade web conferencing that BigBlueButton provides to the Moodle community,” says Brian Carlson, CEO of eThink Education. “Our partnership with Blindside Networks enables us to offer a free tier of BigBlueButton to all our customers.”
Under the agreement Blindside Networks will provide eThink Education hosting for a Free Tier of BigBlueButton hosting that, similar to MoodleCloud, is limited to six concurrent users (no desktop sharing or recordings). eThink Education customers can use the embedded Free Tier, at no extra cost, for on-line office hours, tutoring, and small classes. Customers can contact Blindside Networks for easy upgrade to premium hosting.
Blindside Networks premium hosting includes support for larger classes, downloadable session recordings (h.264 videos), dial-in numbers, branded portals, and the ability to invite a guest into a session.
“eThink Education provides world-class hosting and support for Moodle that really benefits the Moodle community at large,” says Fred Dixon, CEO of Blindside Networks. “I would recommend anyone looking for an learning management solution to contact eThink Education.”
A recent survey by Moodle Research of 353 Moodle sites showed over 13% of Moodle sites were using the BigBlueButtonBN integration for embedding virtual classrooms in their Moodle site. No other web conferencing system scored high enough to rank on the survey. See: http://research.moodle.net/71/.
BigBlueButton is open source with documentation and source code available at http://bigbluebutton.org/.
About Blindside Networks
Blindside Networks started the BigBlueButton project in 2008 with one goal: to provide remote students a high quality online learning experience. BigBlueButton is a commercial grade open source web conferencing system that enables instructors to teach students online with real-time sharing of audio, video, slides, chat, desktop, and polls. Blindside Networks provides premium hosting and support for BigBlueButton, as well as develops and supports the BigBlueButtonBN integration for Moodle. http://blindsidenetworks.com/.
About eThink Education
Formed in 2008, eThink is a rapidly growing Certified Moodle Partner providing implementation, integration, and management services for the open source Learning Management System Moodle in the Higher Education, K-12 and corporate sectors. Open-source Moodle is the most widely used Learning Management System in the world. When implemented and managed by experts, Moodle is an extremely dynamic platform capable of matching, and often surpassing, the functionality of the competing systems in the market. eThink’s Moodle cloud hosting services offers unrivalled performance and exceptional value. http://ethinkeducation.com/.