It sorta amazes me to see educational organisations - especially those based in Canada - using Zoom for online educational events. What's wrong with BigBlueButton? It's at least as cost effective (for us, it's $0! Use ours!) because it's fully #libre and we host our own (you - or your institution - could, too).. And it's a community-run project led by Canadians! Unlike Zoom, which is built for corporate drones, BBB is built for education from the ground up. I can't see what's so hard about this.
Does your institution have a CompSci department? Or do software development training? Why is it not a standard project for such department to run such services for the benefit of the institution?! It'd be a massively useful real-world teaching opportunity, with huge cost benefit for the institution, too. Seems like a total no-brainer to me. Anyone able to explain why we don't see this everywhere already?
@lightweight Payola, or whatever the equivalent in tech. Microsoft has a history of bribing professors to teach to Microsoft technology, so even if those departments were running the school infrastructure, the result would probably be learning on a single big tech platform and only getting to choose from that big tech's offerings. Of course they'd then be well prepared for the corporate world. ;-)
@lwriemen heh. Yeah, it's true that Microsoft exerts unethical influence everywhere. We need to expel them from their educational role (similarly Google and Apple, not to mention Adobe).