Big blue boneheads

Another little administrative tidbit from today. I’m sure they meant well. I just wish that they also thought well while doing it sometimes …

Apparently the university here in Not-Bielefeld has recently mandated that all new teaching staff have to take a one-hour, online “welcome workshop” within their first two months. Among other topics designed to help everyone survive to their third month, one tutorial involves how to use the open-source, virtual-classroom tool BigBlueButton, AKA BBB.

Now, I’ve ragged on previously about BBB, but I’ll give credit where credit is due. The programmers have worked really hard in the meantime to make BBB today what zoom was three years ago. Seriously. Although it’s promoted as a “virtual classroom”, it’s still basically just a video-conferencing platform where you can upload presentations, share screens, go into breakout rooms, and chat either publicly or privately. But, because BBB was “uniquely designed” from a pedagogical perspective, it also includes cutting-edge teaching tools like polls and multiuser whiteboards.

Or, like I said, what zoom was three years ago.

The obvious question in all this is if this tutorial is really necessary.

For starters, who over the age of corona has not experienced video-conferencing software yet? Three years ago when the University foisted BBB on all us old geezers without any instruction whatsoever, we still got it to work to get our teaching done. It’s not exactly rocket science and the BBB website even includes a testimonial from a person with an uncomfortably long job title who extolls how BBB “works without any prior knowledge.” (Unfortunately, as written, the quote implies that it’s BBB that doesn’t have the prior knowledge. About anything. But it works, so who cares, right?) And should you still somehow manage to go astray, the default presentation when you open up BBB is a three-page tutorial into all its features.

Even stupider, remember that the workshop is online via none other than BBB. So if you’ve managed to log in to take part in the workshop at all—and don’t look like a cat while doing so—you’re already at least halfway there.

More importantly, apart from distance-learning institutions, who uses BBB for teaching anymore anyway? I can’t even remember the last time I used it and there’s two incredibly simple reasons for that:

1. The pandemic is over.
2. Online teaching sucks.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?