On March 13, Northwestern Michigan College made the difficult decision to close in order to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. Faculty, staff, and students had to change their approach to education the remainder of the semester. With support from the Educational Media Technology department, most faculty transitioned to remote learning within a few days. At the forefront of this change were technologies that many faculty had little experience with, including video conferencing software like Zoom and Discord.
   These video conferencing companies were unprepared for the inundation of instructors and classes being delivered remotely around the world. Zoom Video Communications, Inc., experienced major outages in the first days of shutdown, often leaving instructors and public school teachers without a venue to teach their classes. “We did not design the product with the foresight that, in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying, and socializing from home,” Eric Yuan, a Chinese immigrant and founder of Zoom, stated in an April 1 blog post.
   Yuan rose to the challenge presented by such an influx of users. According to NPR’s Bobby Allyn in a May 7 article, “Daily use of the remote-meeting service ballooned to 300 million from about 10 million in a matter of months.” Over the past five months, Zoom has updated at least 49 times. These updates have addressed many instability issues caused by the surge of daily meeting participants.
   With the transition to version 5.0 of its software, the company addressed a growing problem—Zoombombing. This is an event where random individuals randomly guessed a Zoom meeting number to join it. The first security upgrade to address this issue enforced default password requirements on new meetings. A later update changed the meeting encryption to a more secure algorithm. This provides a much higher level of data integrity, enduring that the meeting can’t be intercepted and modified for malicious purposes.

   “I am committed to being open and honest with you about areas where we are strengthening our platform and areas where users can take steps of their own to best use and protect themselves on the platform,” Yuan explained.

   Some instructors instead transitioned to using Discord, a service often associated with video gaming.