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Comment by Kipters | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can see, Teams is going to gain A TON of users in the coming weeks, most universities and schools are starting to use it to provide online lessons to their students, far more than Meet

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As a student in one of the main universities in northern Italy, I can tell you the lessons are provided through the open source platform BigBlueButton. Student/teacher personal sessions although seem to rely primarily on skype.

In University of Bologna all professors are supposed to use Teams.

Which one? PoliMi for one uses Teams (glad to know someone is using OSS software though)

PoliTo, and I was kinda surprised since we too take part in the Microsoft partnership program.

Strange, a BBC news clip I saw the other day had an italian professor saying they are all using webex.

I can't imagine how frustrating using that for lessons (so multiple connected parties) would be - it's hard enough to make it work with just two parties. Either the video works and no sound, or sound works but no video. Or just doesn't even connect.

Very unreliable from what I've seen.

did they show webex? or might it have been a 'kleenex' brand name issue? any video-conferencing is 'webex' to a lot of folks.

I'm teaching at University of Trento. At the moment I'm using google meet + google classroom. Today my class was followed by 45 students, and everything worked well. Yesterday I was unable to record the lesson, but today it worked. As a backup, I used Audacity to record the audio (the slides are freely available online)

The go to software is actually Zoom. It does webinars and has a host of features specifically tailored for this market.

Universities are by-and-large, not Microsoft shops.

Teams is picking up from Lync/Skype-for-Business in many Microsoft shops.

Do you have any data? Are you from Italy or speaking from your bubble?

I couldn't find any data about Italy. From personal experience in neighbor country Croatia, all universities are Microsoft shops and nobody even knows what Zoom is.

I'm from Italy and I can speak for my University (Verona). All of my teachers are using Zoom either to do lessons or to talk to students privately. I'm kinda surprised since they're paying for Office365.

From my personal experience in Croatia, I never used a Microsoft product during my studies. Moreover, using Linux was mandatory for some courses.

My comment was specific to Italy :) I know people in at least two universities that are using Teams and Stream for online lessons (many universities in Italy use Office 365)

At least in Germany all universities allow you to use most Microsoft stuff for free.

I think you mean that Universities pay some MS EES Agreement to Microsoft in order to offer OS updates, Office and other MS software for students and staff.

I don't know how it works at a university level, but at least when i did some admin stuff for a university department office 365 was free for students and staff.

I don't think the university pays for that, I believe MS just offers them for free to some folks to get them hooked, it's the same as BizSpark and other initiatives.

I can confirm that University pays for MS EES Agreement. In return you can, for example, install office on every pc in Active Directory, upgrade to every windows operating system on pc owned by the University (for example you buy Windows Home on a pc, you can upgrade to professional edition) and so on.

You're right, it's a paid service, but they usually get substantial discounts (smaller schools can even get it for free if they have the right contacts)

I thought a lot of schools took advantage of DreamSpark, or what ever the education program is called now. When I was in school, we could log in and download pretty much any Microsoft program or OS (server and consumer) with full licenses.

We didn't use any of the Microsoft programs as part of our education (no skype or teams), I think we transitioned from GMail to Outlook Online by the time I graduated

My school in the midwest USA will probably be using meet. As we already pay for gsuite.

Gawd. Teams is so rubbish compared to Slack: - team channels are stuck in their own area away from DM and ad hoc group chats - content seems to disappear - downloading files, and in particular pictures, and then finding what it has been named and where it went is a nightmare.

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