News

As the coronavirus pandemic forced many of us to stay home, we moved online, introducing a virtual delivery of a number of our course titles. As part of our LiveOnline delivery, our courses are delivered live via Zoom. In the first couple of weeks of Covid-19 lockdowns, Zoom's user base grew exponentially and was faced with some criticism about the security of online meetings. In response to those early criticisms, Zoom has been quick to address security shortcomings through a range of software upgrades. We have taken advantage of these settings to ensure that we are providing a safe and secure learning environment. Some of the security features we have enabled are: 

• All sessions are password protected regardless of how they are joined (Zoom app, browser or phone) ensuring only invited participants can join
• All invites include a reminder to not post any meeting details on the public internet
• Screen sharing is on for the host only and is controlled by the host to prevent Zoombombing
• The waiting room is on by default – ensuring only people registered on the course may enter.
• Recording of the session is disabled by default
• Traffic traversing China is turned off.

We are confident that Zoom is the best tool for delivering quality LiveOnline training as it is easy to join training sessions from any device or supported browser by simply clicking a link. It is one of the few tools that allows for every participant's video to be seen, it has breakout rooms allowing group work and it is user-friendly.

Zoom has recently introduced full GCM encryption which will encrypt all meeting information as well as the personal information of anyone in a meeting.

While we agree that end-to-end encryption is still something Zoom needs to build into their app for it to be a viable product to use for discussing sensitive subject matters, we believe the current level of security is more than enough for the purposes of online learning. Zoom has stopped all feature development in order to focus exclusively on end-to-end encryption as well as other security enhancements and we believe it will be an even better product in a few months’ time.

Forbes wrote a good article summing up how Zoom found themselves in this situation and has a few good arguments for still using Zoom.

Click here for more information about how we're ensuring the security of our online courses.