Preventing, or at least minimizing, the infringement of academic freedom at a technical level means that a digital education platform should address the following:
- Minimizing the ability of outside parties to eavesdrop or crash in on a lecture, using features such as:
- End to end encryption
- Secure management of encryption keys
- Meeting passwords
- Waiting rooms
- Presenter controls over attendees
- Barring anonymous participants
- Minimizing the ability of outside parties to censor or block lectures and/or lecture attendance, including refusing to honor such requests
- Minimizing the ability of foreign governments to request content and/or attendee data from a platform vendor
- Maximizing a student’s ability to connect to lectures. This may include:
- Being accessible to students in a foreign country without the need to use a virtual private network (VPN)
- Being optimized for use over a VPN, as VPN’s incur more network overhead and latency
The following table has been developed using publicly available information from each of the distance education platform vendors listed below. In some cases the feature is on by default, in other cases it is an available option that the presenter should select. All the solutions listed below are able to provide synchronous lectures (meetings & webinars) and record them for asynchronous use. Both Zoom and Yuja are currently configured and supported for faculty synchronous and asynchronous lectures. The remainder either requires significant configuration and documentation to get ready for faculty use (thus rated Low) or requires contract and procurement as a starting point (thus rated None).
| Feature / Vendor | Zoom | Microsoft | Kaltura | Yuja | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | Zoom | Teams for Education | Meet | Virtual Classroom | Active Learning Platform (Video Conferencing) |
| End to End Encryption (data/video) | N (1) | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Encryption (phone) | N | N | N | N | N |
| Encryption key holder | Zoom (2) | Hybrid (3) | Kaltura | Yuja | |
| Meetings require passwords | Y | Y | Y | Y | N |
| Start meeting only when presenter joins | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Can enable waiting rooms | Y | Y | Y | Y | N |
| Can disable attendee recording | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Can bar anonymous attendees | Y | Y | Y (4) | Y (5) | |
| Student access from China | Unblocked | Requires VPN | Requires VPN | Requires VPN | Unknown (6) |
| Will comply with foreign government requests for data (7) | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| UCI Readiness to Deploy and Support for Faculty Synchronous Lectures | High | Low | Low | None (8) | High (9) |
- End to end encryption beta starting 7/31/2020. General availability should follow soon thereafter.
- Customer key management feature announced as coming soon
- Vendor manages data in transit encryption key, customer manages data at rest encryption key
- Set at the organizational level, not the meeting level
- Feature requires vendor to administer
- Yuja states that it is not their responsibility to validate if they are accessible via China
- Assumes the request is legal under the foreign government’s laws
- Kaltura is included for comparison purposes. Neither UCI nor the UC system has a contract with them
- Yuja Video Conferencing is integrated with Canvas and capable of synchronous lectures for 200 people or less (including lecturer).
The use of a VPN to access applications outside of China requires going through the country’s congested Internet border. VPNs wrap data traffic within a secure layer, adding additional overhead to network traffic. This in turn can result in poor network performance at points of congestion, meaning that although a service may be accessible, it is not practically usable.