Zoom Videoconferencing for Low Bandwidth Links

Turning off received video in Zoom

AARnet provide Zoom Video Conferencing to Australian universities, so I end up in a lot of such conferences. This works fine in my university office, with a high bandwidth connection, but not so well when I am out and about on a 4G wireless modem. Zoom lacks the bandwidth friendly features of other videoconferencing software, such as Blackboard Collaborate, but there are ways to make it more usable.

One option if you have a limited or unreliable Internet connection is to use a phone for audio. You can dial into the video conference, and use your phone for the audio, but use the Internet connection to see presentations, and text chat.

If you are presenting, then one approach I suggest is to have a picture of yourself on the first or second slide. This gives your audience something to look at if video is not working. Also you can email the slides to the organizer in advance and let them handle it. They can then send you control of the presentation, or it is not complex, and you are having Internet problems, let them changes the slides when you request it. This way you just need the audio working.

If you Internet connection is limited, you can minimize the Zoom video window, and hide the video. In a quick test I found this reduce data use to one tenth: from 1.5 Mbps, to about 150 Kbps. Most of the data traffic comes from displaying video of the norther participants on your screen.

Digital Colombo Plan

In a submission to the Australian Government's  Draft National Strategy for International Education, AARnet have proposed a “Digital Colombo Plan". Australian students would use video conference and collaboration tools, during and after their studies (as reported in The Australian). I proposed something similar in my paper "Chinese and Australian Students Learning to Work Together Online: Proposal to Expand the New Colombo Plan to the Online Environment" presented at the 9th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE). Vancouver, Canada in 2014. However, I suggest the emphasis should be on the skills the stud nets need to be able to work together effectively. AARnet's submission emphasizes having quality telecommunications links to university in the region, which would certainly help, but the staff and students need formal training in how to use the technology they have.  

ps: When teaching a couple of dozen students how to design web pages at the University of Samoa, my class managed to use up all of the bandwidth allocated to the entire university (fortunately the course was during vacation time).