The effect of COVID-19 on the education system around the world is catastrophic, to say the least, but LPU adapted to the changing dynamics quickly and introduced online learning for its students.
Most of the classes for the first half of the term-2 for the academic year 2020-21 were held in Google meet. Google meet is a Video-conferencing service developed by Google as a replacement to Google Hangouts that was retired in October 2019.
Meet is minimalistic in its design and has a beautiful User interface that made it very simple and intuitive for people who never used the service before. LPU started using Google meet in mass proportion for online classes from mid-July 2020 but the instructors quickly realised the issues an unsecured class can pose.
What is meet-bombing?
Meet-bombing alludes to the undesirable, problematic interruption, most probably by Internet trolls and miscreants, into a video call/meeting on the Google meet platform. In a general Meet-bombing occurrence, the meeting is compromised by the miscreants with the addition of material that is inappropriate to the meeting’s agenda, commonly resulting in ending the meeting.
How does meet-bombing occur?
The students to disrupt a class share the meeting link of the class among their friends who may or may not be part of LPU and they enter the meeting with this link and start disrupting the class.
How to Prevent Meet-bombing
The instructor can sign up for a G Suite.
If the meeting is planned through the G Suite, outside users can join the meeting only if they were invited by the instructor through an e-mail. Everyone else must have to request to join the meeting and their entry must be acknowledged by the host.
In case a miscreant still managed to join and disrupt the meeting the host can always remove them from the meeting. For further help, the host can click on the ‘report’ button in the meeting tab to send a detailed meeting log to Google technicians who will take measures to stop such an incident from happening again.
It is the moral responsibility of every student to respect their teachers and not to disrupt the learning environment. This is the very first time in human history where remote education achieved this level of importance and we have to make great use of it for self-development. If you know a particular student is responsible for such meet-bombing incidents, immediately report them to the concerned instructor.
