I’m getting ready to start testing a classroom management software called Veyon and wanted to see if there were alternatives I should look at. The biggest factor is that it needs to be free. My budget has been clamped down to only the support contracts that are required.
The one big feature that Veyon is lacking is audio when running in demonstration mode. That one thing would let me offer spillover students to get the same lecture without having to use zoom/teams which is proving to be slightly problematic to install and awkward to run with other applications. Spillover students will be in a second classroom to maintain distancing rules.
Since Veyon works on VNC, it may never have audio with the demo mode.
I have it installed in the default way for just about every option and it’s working. Had trouble with LDAP, need to explore the program options and more see what isn’t working here. It is pretty neat and the only real issue I have is that one room has a 1920x1080 display for the teacher, the student computers all have a 1600x900 display. When broadcasting in full screen mode, information is off the screen (no scaling). In windwed broadcast mode, the students can resize the window so that everything scales (not always scales nicely though). I may need to dig into the options for the VNC used in Veyon, it’s a version of UltraVNC but it seems to be a trimmed down version. Alternate I might need to install a different VNCserver/client on each computer to get scaling working properly.
But for right now I can give a set of instructions that work.
The biggest need for this is that the teacher can see the student’s screen when they have a question, there is no more standing over their shoulder to see what is happening and offer fixes or suggestions. I just wish the frame rate was better when doing this, not sure what to tweak but playing video is not great, maybe 10 fps, maybe less. And of course no audio which is going to be an issue since that either all or part of each project (depending on the class they are in).
I’ll take another look, but I don’t think Moodle allows a teach to control the windows/Linux computers in a classroom. My wife took some online classes and they switched from Blackboard to Moodle after her first semester. But I’ll look and see if there are other features I’m not aware of.
I wish our college would switch to Moodle, would save massive amounts of money over Blackboard, and money is a big issue right now for pretty much every State college in the USA. State funding is really down, enrollment is down, county contributions are way down… Either cut back, cut off, or increase tuition. We are in both of the cut phases.
Technology gaps for somewhere around 10 to 25 percent of the students who take classes where I work is a big problem. Laptops and internet being the big hurdles right now. Chromebooks are easy to get and loan out, but they don’t do everything, and we still need to find ways to get them connected at home. Cellular hotspots have been one way, but that of course comes with a big monthly price.
Sorry, way off topic, but it might help people understand when they talk to other people in the education system. Unless my administration is stretching the truth, we’re all in dire straights.
Don’t know if Moodle can work with software like X2Go or VNC but it should. In any event I would set up a lab and test different possibilities. Make your case. Moodle has much improved since the last time I’ve worked with it but at the current time I can’t spend unpaid time to investigate what is new. Moodle does have an online demo.
Good luck with your project.