Ever since the lockdown was imposed in the third week of March, to curb the spread of the coronavirus, holding of seminars, conferences, workshops and meetings has virtually come to a halt. At this juncture, webinars gained popularity.
With them, institutions and even individuals found the easy way out to stay connected with their clients and friends, without the need to move out of their homes. Webinar, a combination of ‘web’ and ‘seminar’, is a video workshop. A computer or laptop with an Internet connection is all that is needed to participate in a webinar. The online apps provide free conference facilities for up to 40 minutes, when the number of participants does not exceed 100. There are also ‘paid’ plans, which allow the conference host to allow thousands of participants to join, depending on the plan.
A webinar, hosted from London during the lockdown last week, saw the participation of experts from across the globe, including India. The participants had to register using the link provided and join at the appointed time and date to give their presentation or interact with experts.
Educational institutions and also large families, having students or relatives, in different locations are using webinars to provide virtual classroom experience or to connect with their near and dear ones to beat the lockdown blues. “I take classes for UG students and conduct seminars for PGs through webinar and I find the app very useful in view of the restrictions on movement due to the lockdown,” says G. Hanumatha Rao, Professor and Head of the Department of Ophthalmology, Maharaja Institute of Medical Sciences, Nellimarla, Vizianagaram.
“We made a quick survey and zeroed in on ‘Zoom’ as it is popular in the market for a decade. Its quality and also the higher number of persons, who can join in, compared to other similar apps, made us prefer this. Further, all our professors are not tech-savvy and Zoom provides ease of use, which is another reason for our choosing it,” G. Gopalakrishna, Chief Technology Officer of Gitam Deemed to be University, told The Hindu.
On data security concerns of Zoom, Mr. Gopalakrishna, said that the app developers could have done away with certain security features for enabling ‘ease of use’ features. The developers have now come up with a new version with end-to-end encryption and added security features. One needn’t worry much as long as he/she doesn’t part with confidential information, he added.