Add Lock Settings dialog for finer grain control over viewer capabilities

[Fred Dixon]

Currently, the moderator can manually lock a viewer to prevent them from sharing their microphone.

However, there have been a number of request for more finer grain control over the capabilities of a viewer.

1.  Webinar (view only)

All viewers are prevented from sharing their webcam, microphone, and chatting.  They can only view the presenter (listen and watch the presentation).

2.  Webinar (chat only)

All viewers are prevented from sharing their webcam, microphone, and doing private chat.

3.  On-line quiz

During a class, a teacher gives students 10 minutes to complete a quiz (such as in Moodle).  During this time, the teacher can disable private chat for all students (viewers).

To implement the above scenarios, we want to add the ability for the moderator to enforce the above scenarios without adding complexity to the user experience.

Currently, when a user is locked, it means

Unlocked -- Share microphone: Yes 

Lock -- Share microphone: No

One solution is to give the moderator the ability to control the meaning of lock/unlock to have any combination of the four viewer capabilities:

Webcam    

Microphone    

Public Chat   

Private Chat 

The design is to give the moderator a dialog box (Lock Settings) to configure which which capabilities are enabled/disabled when a user is locked.

For example, the current lock behaviour (user can not use their microphone) would be set as 

              Enabled         

Webcam           X               

Microphone                      

Public Chat      X               

Private Chat     X                

The scenario for 'Webinar (view only)' would be 

               Enabled        

Webcam                            

Microphone                       

Public Chat                      

Private Chat                      

The scenario for 'Webinar (chat only)' would be

               Enabled        

Webcam                            

Microphone                       

Public Chat                      

Private Chat     X              

The settings for 'On-line quiz' would be

               Enabled        

Webcam           X                

Microphone       X               

Public Chat      X               

Private Chat                   

Moderators can not be locked.  

We would add two new menu items to the User Controls (Gear Icon) in the User's window.

  Lock All/Unlock All

  Lock Settings

The moderator could then lock all viewers, or individually lock/unlock a viewer, to restrict their actions.  When 'Lock All' is enabled, new incoming viewers are also locked.  

A locked viewer would have the lock icon appearing next to their name.

We would still retain the Mute All command because muting a user does not prevent them from unmuting themselves.  

A final level of control would be to give the moderator the ability to individually set the lock settings for each viewer.  We need to determine the best way to provide this as clicking on the lock icon for a viewer currently locks/unlocks that user.  Do we add yet another button next to the user for the Lock Settings dialog just for that user?

The default values for the Lock Settings could be set in the config.xml in the UsersModule

 <module name="UsersModule"...

                />

                

with parameters such as

  lock_webcam=true|false

  lock_microphone=true|false

  lock_public_chat=true|false

  lock_private_chat=true|false

We would add a lock_all_users=true|false option to enable developers to create BigBlueButton sessions that automatically start with all viewers locked to whatever scenario they wish.

Opened an issue to track this effort 

  https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/issues/detail?id=1702

Feedback welcome!

--
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

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