Actual Practice of Short Time Period Implementation of MultipleWeb Conferencing Systems for Online Classes

Abstract

With the expansion of COVID-19 outbreaks, the lecture environment has changed dramatically. Various activities have been held by distance learning, however, the style of online learning and hybrid learning is also popular. The key to these lectures is the web conferencing tool. The key factor to success in new age lectures is how the web conferencing tool can be adapted to the existing information system. Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) has developed full online courses from the first semester (spring semester) in April 2020. However, the increase of the infection has remained constant, and TUAT will continue to provide online courses using the web conferencing tool from the second semester (fall semester) in October 2020, and hybrid courses that combine face-to-face teaching. To support this, a campus-wide license was purchased that enables the use of three different web conferencing tools including Zoom Meeting, Cisco Webex, and Google Meet in the suitable applications. For the start of the second semester, the Information Media Center (IMC) has developed a system to integrate with the existing authentication system to enable use of the these three tools. Since we didn't have enough time to implement the system integration, we need to take less than a month (about 3 weeks) from the contract to the start of service. In this presentation, we explain in detail how we designed the system and how it was implemented in order to deploy these systems in a very short time period. We will also mention the implementation issues we faced. By explaining the ideal and reality of the system, we would like to discuss together with the SIGUCCS community how the system should be designed for the unusual situation.