IT Alert

Many faculty at the University of Mississippi are planning to lead classes on the Zoom video conferencing platform beginning Monday March 23, 2020.  We are clearly not the only ones planning to use this service; a large number of universities, K-12 school districts, and workplaces are making heavy use of Zoom at this time. Zoom has assured the UM Office of Information Technology that it is prepared for this large increase in use.  However, it is the position of UM IT that smart planning includes contingency planning, and some performance issues with Zoom have been reported nationally. As a result, we are encouraging faculty to be prepared to fall back to one or more alternative instructional delivery techniques in the event that we experience issues with Zoom.

The first fallback position for many faculty and students will be the Google Meet video conferencing solution offered by Google as part of UM's Google Suite for Education.  Google Meet is intuitive, and faculty and students who have prepared in advance to use Zoom should be able to pick up this user interface with little trouble.  That said, it always pays to be prepared. Faculty who have not already done so are encouraged to go here in the MyOleMiss portal (webid authentication is required) and activate their UM Gmail accounts.  It can take up to a half hour to process this request, so it would be best to complete this over the weekend when there is no time pressure.  Further, faculty may also wish to log in to their UM Google accounts and perform some brief experiments, learning the controls of the system and setting up any system permissions that may be needed on their computers. (To get to Google Meet, log in to your go.olemiss.edu account and then go to https://meet.google.com. A Quick Start Guide is available here.)  Then, should a Zoom session have problems during a class, it will be relatively quick and painless to fall back to this alternate system and continue teaching. 

To be clear, we do not expect Zoom to fail.  That said, we also did not expect to be teaching the second half of the semester online. Over the last two weeks we have all re-learned the value of preparation and contingency planning.  Please take this opportunity to review the options available to you and be ready in the event that a backup plan is suddenly necessary.