Privacy concerns, mobile compatibility and full integration with the existing equipment are three major challenges that producers have to take to craft specialized solutions for educational institutions and continue growing in this segment of the web conferencing market.
Education is still an under-represented segment of the market of web conferencing, according to 2016 Contact North’s report (https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/exploring-future-education/web-conferencing), but its potentiality of growth is high. According to Frost & Sullivan’s 2016 report, it is just from education, health care, manufacturing and retail that the foreseen 8.4% web conferencing market expansion of 2020 should come from. Yet, distance learning shows some critical issues that producers must take into due consideration, as they heavily impact on the decisions of educational institutions on this matter.
Privacy has always been an important issue for universities and colleges. It is not a matter of obscure quibbles imposed by a weird legislation; behind, there are real concerns of safeguarding the academic freedom, and the desire to provide students with a seamless learning environment. For this reason, the more secure a web conferencing product is, the better it is.
This explains the reasons why on-premise server based solutions are preferred by educational institutions. R-HUB`s TurboMeeting (http://www.rhubcom.com) and Cisco’s WebEx are two example of this kind of products. They both offer a high level of security, integration and compatibility with tablets and mobiles. The difference is price. R-HUB is able to sell their TurboMeeting servers at a lower price than Cisco.
Mobile compatibility is crucial, as millennials learn using tablets even earlier than walking. So, it is not surprising to discover that many students have relegated the old pc case tower to the museum and do everything by typing on the small screen of an iPhone 6. So, that much is true, designers of web conferencing products for education must pay particularly attention to create flexible, adaptable UI that works well even on these small devices.
Last but not least, integration with existing learning technologies is important, as educational institutions have already massively invested on educational equipment in the last few years. So, they prefer agile solutions that can be easily combined with the equipment they have to unified (but not-flexible) communication suites (UC). On the other hand, there aren’t yet available UC on the market that specifically target the needs of educational institutions.
In conclusion, educational institutions pose some specific challenges to vendors that shall be addressed in the near future. On-premise server based solutions are still the most suitable for the segment, as they are able to combine privacy safeguard with flexibility, integration and mobile compatibility.