Critical open networking for virtual classrooms at internet scale 🌐

Winning over the classroom with Jitsi — at scale

In the week of April 26th, open source video communication platform Jitsi is organizing a Hackathon to advance the state of the union of collaborative cloud interactions. Sponsored by the European Union, the goal is to explore and unlock the potential of unlimited open communication for the benefit of students and teachers globally.

If anything, the ongoing COVID19 pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of communication and collaboration infrastructure. As a parent, I clearly see and live with the challenges that my son and his teachers face on a daily basis. Many systems were not designed for the current situation, and students being unable to take online tests because they cannot get into the system reliably is frustrating for all. Removing barriers like physical proximity, system instability or technical limits on the number of users will be key to overcome these hurdles, to establish “a new normal”.

Given this context, a conversation with Jitsi founder Emil Ivov inspired me to participate in this Hackathon. The topic of our conversation was the scale of the Jitsi platform, which today supports around 100 participants per session (conference room). To enable larger scale real-time interactive classes, it would be good to extend that limit, and the Jitsi team is working on that — but some believe this would be too complex of a challenge for a week long Hackathon…

Our goal: 500+ students in a virtual interactive classroom

To “debottleneck” the system and enable teachers to organize virtual online classes with arbitrarily large numbers of students, we need to understand where the limits are, and what options we have for extending those. I have some ideas, but I purposely choose not to constrain the creative process of the virtual team that will be taking on this challenge; this is still a competition, after all…

Come join me and find out how we could change the world of Jitsi as we know it. To clarify: We are aiming to conceptualize, design and realize an interactive educational platform including a Jitsi deployment that can support 100s of students per session.