A summary of 40 hours of conference content in to 40 minutes of highlights filled with creative ideas, best practices, and opportunities to work smarter.

AARNet Zooms past 5 billion meeting minutes in 2020

The events of 2020 have impacted lives and economies across the globe, and seen unprecedented growth across all unified communication and video conferencing platforms, but none so much as Zoom. It’s become a verb we all do and the defacto platform for hosting everything from preferred seating at the Formula 1 or Football, to the sitting of Government and the delivery of the majority of the worlds online synchronous education.

Among this backdrop, AARNet has seen demand from the Australian education sector expand dramatically, with October representing the month in which managed meeting minutes on AARNet accounts soared past 5 billion for the calendar year. Zoom revealed at their annual user conference, that globally they will exceed 600 times this in 2020. The AARNet total alone represents almost 800,000 students connecting to their education via Zoom, with peaks of over 100,000 meetings and courses delivered via Zoom each day.

Key Zoom feature announcements for education

The Zoomtopia conference included a raft of new feature and product announcements, with different value and relevance to Australian Education. AARNet Zoom advisor, Geoff Lambert led the Brunch and Learn audience through a summarised highlight of these, including the introduction and limitations of End to End encryption, the availability of automated live transcription, webinar breakouts, and future enhanced brain storming opportunities and whiteboard features native to Zoom Rooms.

With explanation of the longer term strategic Zoom platforms such as On.Zoom.com (an online event marketing portal) and Zapps (in-meeting, Zoom 3rd party applications), the session also recommended a subset of the very best presentations from Zoomtopia, worthy of time to watch and discover. Case studies of leading practice in design, usage, or online modality from around the world.

AARNet’s Brunch and Learn Zoom series is open for live involvement by everyone who subscribes to AARNet network or Zoom services, including participants from the CIO level down to L&T advisors and technical Zoom administrators. A community from across the sector who want to be kept informed about the opportunities this changing technology brings and hear of best practice exemplars from peer institutions and complementary products to the Zoom platform.

Author: Geoff Lambert, AARNet Zoom Customer Advisor