The October AARNet Zoom Brunch and Learn session introduced Zoom administrators and learning and teaching specialists from across the country to several of Zoom’s recent feature and product releases.

Of particular interest to educators was the new feature that allows hosts to broadcast voice and video directly to all open breakout rooms, and a demonstration of meeting and webinar captions being translated live to and from English and any one of 11 other languages.

Zoom’s automated live translation of captions is a significant step forward for international conferences, students for whom English may be a second language, and for researchers with international collaborators. This automated translation feature, which can be processed in Australia for data sovereignty if required, will be of interest to those teaching languages in Higher Education, K-12 Schools and various cultural institutes across the sector. Zoom has indicated that more languages may be added in future updates to compliment the 11 already available, including French, German and Spanish, as well as the beta release of Asian languages such as Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Whilst machine translation cannot always be completely accurate, the quality is high, and this live, automated, and almost immediate translation of speech to text within the meeting environment creates many opportunities for creative educators and those involved with international communication.

During the Brunch and Learn workshop, the AARNet customer success team also took Zoom administrators through the key settings that they look at when reviewing the health of a Zoom account for security, functionality, capacity and integration. This provided participants with a useful list of recommended health checks to undertake for their organisation during the end of year period.

The customer case study for the session was presented by the University of Melbourne who demonstrated the value of integrating Service Now and Zoom for efficiently adding and releasing add-on Zoom licenses, and for monitoring and reporting their demand. In addition, an automated triage of email notifications about meetings at risk ensures timely guidance, and intervention as needed, so that meeting hosts can reduce the risk of interruptions to public Zoom meetings.

For access to the latest features, or advice on how to license Zoom Events, Language Translation, Zoom Phone, or Zoom webinars, contact your local AARNet Customer Relations manager. AARNet recommends all institutions update their Zoom clients regularly to the latest version for enhanced security and to gain access to the new and exciting features from Zoom.

AARNet’s next Zoom Brunch & Learn will be on Thursday 22 November, with a one-hour summary of all things announced and presented at Zoomtopia – Zoom’s annual customer conference.