One concern institutions may have is "how will my network handle large classes viewing classroom media all at the same time?" Specifically the question comes up in situations where there are lecture halls holding 250 students, all trying to view a professor's presentation and answer the activity slides, probably all connected via wireless network.
In this situation, your primary concern is likely the wireless access point through which all of those students may be trying to view classroom media. In addition, since it is unlikely that all of the students would be trying to view a single video on each of their individual devices (more likely the video is being shown on a main screen in the room), it's the presentation activities and any interaction (questions/responses) of students in the EchoVideo Classroom that you may be most concerned with.
Classroom presentations may have interactive activities in them, requiring each student to be viewing it on their individual device, and responding accordingly, possibly taking notes, or asking questions in the classroom.
For the presentations there are a couple of sources of data:
- General Slides
- Media slides (with embedded media)
- Interactive Activities/Polling data
- Notes (being taken by students)
- Questions/Responses (being posted by students and/or the instructor or teaching assistant)
The data movement for Activity slides, Notes, and Questions is trivial; these generate between 1-2 KByte for each student response. For a 250-student class, this totals somewhere in the range of 375KB in total student responses, spread across several seconds or more. The impact on the network in this case is negligible.
The general slides will load for students more quickly or slowly, depending on the size of the slide and the items contained on it. Slides that consist primarily of text or simple diagrams will load quickly. Slides with very large, detailed graphics will load more slowly. But for most slides, the delay should be minimal.
Finally, we have media slides. This is a great unknown, because it's impossible for us to know where the media you are embedding came from, what kind of media it is, etc. What we CAN tell you is that media slides containing video links won't play until the student clicks play (unlike Facebook or other sites that use Autoplay), so up until that point, they act just like regular slides. The size of the preview graphic (poster image) will determine how quickly the slide itself loads.
Bottom line for presentations is that presenting through the EchoVideo classroom, even to a very large number of students over a wireless access point, is unlikely to cause network congestion issues. The amount of bandwidth required for presentations is generally minimal, provided the wireless network isn't also being actively used for "extra-curricular" viewing by students on the same access point.