New Meet features to improve distance learning

Our team has been so inspired by the remarkable work of educators and school leaders around the world, who continue to adapt as schools shift to remote learning. Today, 120 million students and educators are using G Suite for Education worldwide to create, collaborate and communicate despite school closures. With this increase in usage, one consistent theme we’ve heard is that educators are looking for ways to continue teaching and collaborating in a virtual environment that is safe and secure. We’re sharing some ways we’re making Google Meet, a core service of G Suite for Education, work even better for schools.

Extension of access to premium Google Meet features

In order to support ongoing institutional needs, we’ve extended access to premium Meet features at no cost for all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users until September 30, 2020. This means you can have meetings for up to 250 participants per call, live streams for up to 100,000 viewers within your domain, and record meetings and save them to Google Drive. 

Better together: Using Google Meet inside Classroom

More than 100 million students and educators worldwide are now using Classroom. To make it easier to have classes remotely, we’re integrating Classroom and Meet, putting both tools in one place.

Educators can create a unique Meet link for each class, which is displayed on the Classroom Stream and Classwork pages. The link acts as a dedicated meeting space for each class, making it easy for both teachers and students to join.

The Meet links created by the Classroom integration are nicknamed meetings. For education users, participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left, unless they have meeting creation privileges to start a new meeting. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join again until an instructor restarts the nicknamed meeting.

To use this integration, school administrators need to turn on Meet for their domain. Administrators can grant meeting creation privileges to individuals or groups, and we recommend that you assign creation privileges to the organizational units (OUs) that contain your faculty and staff members, which means that students will only be able to join meetings created by faculty or staff.

How Google Meet keeps your video conferences protected

With Meet, institutions can take advantage of the same secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network that Google uses to secure your information. Meet includes protections to safeguard student and educator privacy, including:

• Meet adheres to IETF security standards for Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP).
• In Meet, all data is encrypted in transit by default between the client and Google for video meetings on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, and in meeting rooms with Google meeting room hardware.
• Each Meeting ID is 10 characters long, with 25 characters in the set, so it’s difficult to make an unauthorized attempt to join the meeting by guessing the ID. 
• To limit the attack surface and eliminate the need to push out frequent security patches, Meet works entirely in your browser. This means we do not require or ask for any plugins or software to be installed if you use Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge. On mobile, we recommend that you install the Meet app. 
• Supporting compliance requirements around regulations including COPPA, FERPA, GDPR, and HIPAA.

For tips and best practices for admins on securely deploying Meet to your education domain, visit the Meet security and privacy for education page.

New Google Meet features to help educators keep meetings safe 

We’re rolling out additional features today to all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users to give educators control over their meetings, making them more secure:

• Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants. This ensures that instructors can’t be removed or muted by student participants.
• Only meeting creators and calendar owners can approve requests to join made by participants outside of the school’s domain. This means that students can’t allow external participants to join via video and that external participants can’t join before the instructor.
• Meeting participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join again until an instructor restarts the nicknamed meeting.

For educators wanting to learn more about Meet and how to use it with their students, we recommend checking out Teach From Home, a hub for distance learning resources.