Motivating interaction via webinars and web conferencing

Web conferences and webinars have become very popular ways of transferring knowledge. In addition to providing synchronous, or live interaction, webinars and web conferences can be archived and then accessed on demand for students who may wish to watch the recording again and also leave comments in a discussion forum.

Moodle uses BigBlueButtonBN for web conferencing. It is a plugin and can be installed from the plugins menu in Site Administration. After you select the BigBlueButtonBN option, you have an opportunity to configure it. By default, it is necessary to wait for the moderator in order to start recording. This is an important point because, if you do not wait for the moderator, you may have a bit of chaos.

I've configured BigBlueButtonBN so that it appears on the homepage for the course, Ancient Humanities. It appears under the News forum area, so that it's easy for the students to see.

Once the moderator launches BigBlueButtonBN...