One concern institutions may have is "how will my network handle large classes viewing classroom media all at the same time?" Specifically, the question arises in lecture halls with 250 students, all trying to view a professor's presentation and complete the activity slides, likely all connected via a wireless network.
In this situation, your primary concern is likely the wireless access point that all those students may be using 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 is the presentation activities and any interaction (questions/responses) of students in the EchoVideo Classroom that you may be most concerned with.
Classroom presentations may include interactive activities that require each student to view them on their individual device and respond 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; each student response generates between 1 and 2 KB. For a 250-student class, this totals around 375KB of student responses, spread across several seconds or more. In this case, the impact on the network is negligible.
General slides will load faster or slower, depending on slide size and the items on them. 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 we cannot 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 will not play until the student clicks play (unlike Facebook or other sites that use Autoplay), so until then, they act just like regular slides. The size of the preview graphic (poster image) determines how quickly the slide loads.
Bottom line for presentations: Presenting through the EchoVideo classroom, even to a large number of students over a wireless access point, is unlikely to cause network congestion. The bandwidth required for presentations is generally minimal, provided the wireless network is not also being used for extracurricular viewing by students on the same access point.