Thursday, March 19, 2020

Hangouts Meet improvements for remote learning

What’s changing 

We recently extended Hangouts Meet premium features to all G Suite customers through July 1, 2020 to support employees, educators, and students as they move to work and learn remotely.

To improve the remote learning experience for teachers and students using Hangouts Meet, we’re making several improvements:

  • Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants in a meeting
  • Meeting participants will not be able to re-join nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left

Who’s impacted 

Admins and end users

Why it’s important 

We hope these added controls and improvements will enhance Hangouts Meet for our Education users.

Additional details

Improved meeting control features: 'mute' and 'remove' For our Education customers, only the meeting creator, Calendar event owner, or person who creates a meeting on an in-room hardware device will be allowed to mute or remove other participants in a meeting. This ensures a teacher, as a meeting creator or Calendar event owner, can't be removed or muted by students participating in the event.

Check out our Help Center to learn how to assign meeting creation privileges to teachers and staff members. We recommend that you assign these privileges to the organizational units (OUs) that contain your faculty and staff members.

Improved teacher controls for nicknamed meetings Participants will not be able to re-join a meeting after the final participant has left if:
  • The meeting was created using a short link like g.co/meet/nickname 
  • The meeting was created at meet.google.com by entering a meeting nickname in the "Join or start a meeting” field 
  • The meeting was created in the Meet app by entering a nickname in the “Meeting code” field

This means if the teacher is the last person to leave these types of meetings, students cannot join later without the teacher.

We’ve also heard from some admins that they don’t want students to be able to create meetings. To do so, use this Help Center article to assign meeting creation privileges to teachers and staff only.

Additional resources for getting started with Hangouts Meet 
Visit our Help Center to learn more about using Meet with low bandwidth and tips for training teachers and students.

Getting started 

Admins: Visit the Help Center to learn more about assigning meeting creation privileges to users in your domain.

End Users: No action is required.

Rollout pace 

  • Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: These features have started rolling out and should be available to all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers within 2-3 weeks. 

Availability 

  • Available to G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers 
  • Not available to G Suite Basic, G Suite Enterprise, G Suite Business and G Suite for Nonprofits customers

Resources