Abstract:

The COVID19 pandemic forced many educational institutions to quickly organize a transition from the usual face-to-face teaching to distance teaching.
Not all of them were prepared to tackle the transition, both from a methodological and a technological perspective. As for ICT infrastructures, the emergency prevailed the adoption of solutions offered by large companies (Microsoft, Google, Blackboard, Zoom, etc…) as they were immediately available.

Solutions offered by the big ICT companies have been criticized for not fully respecting personal data management and security. In particular, this problem is evident for institutions with minors as students.

In this paper, we introduce a development of an integrated solution based on completely Open Source systems that has as its primary objective the protection of students', teachers' and operators' data and, at the same time, offers a remarkable level of quality.

The solution, called DAVY, is based on the integration of Moodle, as an LMS environment and Big Blue Button, as a videoconferencing environment.
The work presented in this article concerned the development of BigBlueButton plugin for Moodle to make more accessible the recording of lessons and to allow the use of BigBlueButton as a remote multimedia recording studio.

The existing plugin does not allow the download of recordings. From this plugin, the following features have been added
- possibility to download in MP4 format the full recording;
- download in MP4 format of separate tracks of audio/video sources, presentation, and desktop sharing for later editing process;
- possibility of using a customized background in the recording
- possibility to insert a pre-roll into the recording;
- configuration of site-wide and single activity permissions;

In this way, the integration between BigBlueButton and Moodle allows you to have a complete framework for both the usual a-synchronous teaching (Moodle) and the synchronous teaching activities (Big Blue Button) and also to manage high quality video recordings using the Davy plugin as an online recording studio.

The possibility to download recordings and multimedia tracks separately has also been integrated into the Greenlit interface of BigBlueButton. In this way, through the interface, Greenlite allows each teacher to have a private environment to manage videoconference sessions or to record short-lectures even in a separate mode from Moodle.

The hardware architecture includes a server to host Moodle, a server to host BigBlueButton and Greenlit, and a publishing server for the recordings and the multimedia resources that make up the recordings. The publishing server uses the FFMPEG libraries both for the encoding of separate tracks and for the rendering of the complete edited recording. The complete recording integrates a custom background, a pre-roll, the teacher's audio-video tracks, and the desktop sharing or presentations.

The solution has been used by the degree course in Digital Education of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and for a training course for doctors in specialized training for COVID emergency management (www.geec.it).

In conclusion, we have built a completely Open Source framework that can be used by educational institutions for all the functionalities of distance learning and to produce high-quality video lessons or video demonstrations completely online.

Keywords:

Distance Learning, Open Source, Open Education, Videoconferencing.