With an increased number of classrooms and educations being conducted online, Google is introducing a lot of new changes to improve Meet for their G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users. These include Classroom integration with Meet, security and encryption updates, addition of premium Meet features for free and more.
Google has temporarily extended all of its premium Meet features to all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users till the 30th of September, 2020. These features include support for up to 250 members for meetings, live streaming up to 1,00,000 viewers, the ability to record meetings and save them in Drive.
Targeting easier education, Classroom will now be integrated with Meet where Educators can create a unique Meet link for each class that will be displayed Classroom Stream and Classwork pages. These links will act as a dedicated meeting space for each class. Google has also added measures to ensure that if need be, only educators can restart meetings and not any participant.
Other features that Google has added for Meet include:
- Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other 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.
To ensure security and encryption is maintained, Google has added a number of protections that include:
- Adhering 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, making unauthorized attempt to join near impossible.
- 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 in any browser. On mobile, they recommend that users install the Meet app.
- Supporting compliance requirements around regulations including COPPA, FERPA, GDPR, and HIPAA.