Video lessons have become an integral part of school life these days, just as much as in-person lessons. In Hesse alone, that applies to more than 600,000 children and young people. The technology involved needs to be at the very top of its game if teaching conducted via live video streaming is to make it into homes without a hitch and without jerking, buffering or, worse still, crashing completely as thousands of pupils log on. The video platform needs to be stable even under high traffic and be easy to use for both teachers and pupils.
However, what matters most is that it is secure. The personal data of children, young people of school age and teachers must be given the strongest possible protection. So far, many pupils in Hesse have used software tools such as Teams or Zoom for remote lessons, but data protection officers in the German federal state have complained about weaknesses when it comes to using these tools for educational purposes. That led the Hessian Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science and the Arts to issue a Europe- wide invitation to tender for the operation of a data-protection-compliant videoconferencing system. In August, GEC won the contract from the Ministry to integrate the proposed open-source software BigBlueButton into the state’s schools portal. The experts from GEC are already responsible for the portal’s cloud architecture.