Minerva’s Virtual Academy (MVA), an award-winning online school serving 850 students from grades 7 to 13, has turned to BigBlueButton to enhance its virtual learning environment. Many of MVA’s students, including high-performing athletes, have found traditional education challenging. The school sought a solution that would offer both teachers and students a superior online classroom experience.
Previously reliant on Google Meet, MVA encountered limitations—lacking essential features like private chat, interactive polling, and seamless integration with their learning management system, Canvas. Also, with Google Meet, the manual uploading of recorded lessons consumed valuable administrative time.
Blindside Networks and BigBlueButton transformed MVA’s approach. As part of Canvas LMS since 2012, BigBlueButton’s integration automated the upload of recorded lessons, saving hours each week and providing students easy access to missed sessions. Teachers benefited from built-in active learning tools (such as one-click polling based on content in slides) and analytics that give insight into live student engagement. The time savings and analytics foster a more interactive and supportive learning environment.
“BigBlueButton enables our teachers to deliver the best online lessons for our students, with seamless integration into Canvas that saves us countless hours each week. The customer service from Blindside Networks is excellent as well. Working with them to create a world-class learning environment for our students has been a pleasure.
says Jack Child, Assistant Vice Principal at Minerva’s Virtual Academy.
MVA’s choice of BigBlueButton reflects its commitment to providing top-tier education through innovative tools. The result is a more engaged student body and a reduced loss of instructional time, solidifying BigBlueButton as the academy’s virtual classroom of choice.
About Minerva Learning Academy
Minerva’s Virtual Academy is an award-winning, DfE-accredited online school for 11-18-year-olds that delivers world-class education with a true sense of community. Students can study Key Stage 3, IGCSEs, A Levels, and a world-first esports BTEC from home or anywhere in the world.
To learn more about Minerva Learning Academy, visit: https://www.minervavirtual.com/
About Blindside Networks
Blindside Networks is the creator of BigBlueButton, the built-in virtual classroom for Canvas. Education focused, easy to use, and vetted by millions of users, BigBlueButton is designed to increase learning outcomes for every student.
To learn more about how Blindside Networks can help your online educational organization achieve world-class results, visit https://blindsidenetworks.com/
About BigBlueButton
For online schools that care about learning outcomes, BigBlueButton is a pedagogical-based virtual classroom with built-in tools active learning and live analytics to ensure every student learns. BigBlueButton is open source, localized into over 55 languages, and is built-into the core of Moodle, Canvas, and Schoology. To learn more about BigBlueButton visit https://bigbluebutton.org/Subscribe to receive updates on the upcoming Blindside Networks activities.
If you need expert help with hosting of BigBlueButton, reach out to us directly at Blindside Networks.