Using BigBlueButton with Appointments

Canvas as a great calendar feature called Appointment Group, which gives you the ability to set a range of time slots where student can sign up.

You can link these time slots directly to a BigBlueButton conference, enabling students who sign up for your appointments to join you in a BigBlueButton session with a single click.

Here how to set it up.

First, create a BigBlueButton conference in your course.  Select No time limit so you can re-use the conference, and select Enable waiting room so students can't join unless you are present.

Click Create to create the conference (you can use an existing conference as well).

Once the conference created, you'll copy the URL for starting/joining the conference.  To copy to the clipboard, point at the Start/Join link, right-click in your browser, and choose Copy Link address.

This copies the URL, which looks like this

  https://blindside.instructure.com/courses/9/conferences/1009/join

What is this URL? Whenever a student clicks the Join button, Canvas opens this static URL to join this specific conferene.

Next, create an Appointments Group in your course calendar.  In the image below, we've created six 30 minute appointments between 9:00 am and 12:00 pm.  

Notice in the above screen shot we've pasted in the copied Join link into the Details field.  Select Publish.

Now, whenever students sign up for an appointment for your Office Hours, they will have clickable link to join your office hours (Canvas helpfully turned the pasted link into a clickable link).

Let's say it's 9:00 am on the morning of the appointments.  When you start the BigBlueButton conference, you can use the guest policy to enable BigBlueButton's built-in waiting room.  This lets you manage students as they join.

To setup the built-in waiting room, click the gear icon and choose Guest policy. 

Select, Ask Moderator

Now, when a student wants to join, you'll hear a sound and BigBlueButton will show them in the Waiting Users panel.

You can messuage waiting users, and then click the '(+)' button when you want them to join.

This is helpful if your running a few moments late with the previous student.  Once you finish up, you can enable the next waiting student to join.