[boogies]

Where I live in the US I certainly see teachers using cobbled-together limited proprietary solutions were there is simple superior Free software . Eg. pasting their Zoom links at the top of the Google Classroom stream every day or letting them be buried down below pages of assignments (it seems that Classroom allows only Google Meet links to be included in the header), when leading Free LMSs like Canvas ship with native BigBlueButton integrations. And then using separate services like Nearpod to add interactivity to their Zooms, forcing constant context switching between the two tabs (dozens or even hundreds of times in a single class), when BigBlueButton would allow them to directly upload their slides and automatically detect multiple choice questions for instant integrated polls, and allow students to draw and type directly onto a whiteboard layer over the slides in real time.

[pelasaco]

The reality is that there is no better solution. You can find alternative for this or that component, but you have to deploy yourself, monitor, scale.. Teachers/Schools are on the front, without any support. From the solution point of view, Google Class is the only one that a School can manage, with a small budget, low technical knowledge and no time. Ask for money from task payers, to develop, integrate open source, maintain and deploy it, IMO, has almost no ROI or it's a 10 years plan, we need it now.

[boogies]

> you have to deploy yourself, monitor, scale

That’s flatly false.

Please don’t spread FUD. Your ignorance of better solutions is not proof they don’t exist.

You can go to https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/gl/signup, click “Sign up with Google” (or Twitter, or Microsoft 365, or create a BigBlueButton account), possibly click your Google Account profile picture/username, and done. You now have infinite BigBlueButton rooms. You can go to https://www.instructure.com/canvas/try-canvas#free-account and create a free account or “Request a demo of the full Canvas platform, and we’ll schedule an expert to walk you through the software.”

[pelasaco]

I'm not sure if you are trolling or you never used the Google classroom suite? For sure I know bigbluebutton, but it's not better than Google Classroom (we tried both) but if you don't want to deploy it yourself, the service offered online (which you linked here BTW) is much more expensive than Google classroom and offer much less disk space (which based on our research, was mandatory for the teachers, mainly because they wanted to scan their already existent homework and share it with the kids) . Check https://www.softwareadvice.com/lms/bigbluebutton-profile/vs/... and https://www.capterra.co.uk/compare/162664/186631/bigbluebutt... (I'm not associated with both websites BTW)

[boogies]

Those are weird (presumably auto-generated) apples to oranges comparison. BigBlueButton is just a powerful education-focused web-conferencing system that Learning Management Sytems like Canvas offer native integration with. It’s just like Google Meet with many more education features (uploading slides for interactive whiteboards, etc.) Canvas, Moodle, or something are the things you can compare to Classroom. BigBlueButton is not a LMS and Classrom is not a web conferencing system.