Important update to using Hangouts Meet for remote working and learning

Dear G Suite for Education Administrator,

We’re writing to let you know that we’re extending access to premium Google Meet features from July 1, 2020 to September 30, 2020. We’re also providing an update on new Meet features available for education users.

Extension of access to premium Meet features

In order to support ongoing needs due to school closures, we've extended your access to the following premium Meet features for all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users until September 30, 2020:

Increased participant limit of 250 participants per video call
Live stream a video call (up to 100,000 viewers within a domain)
Record a video call

Note: As the livestream and recording settings will be default off, you must enable them in the Google Admin Console to allow your users to access them. To limit access to these premium features for your faculty and staff, visit the Set up Meet for distance learning page.

Improvements to Google Meet for distance learning

New features to help schools keep meetings safe

We're also rolling out additional features to all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users to improve remote learning experiences:

Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants. This ensures that instructors can't be removed or muted by student participants.
Only meeting creators and calendar owners can approve requests to join made by external participants. This means that students can’t allow external participants to join via video and that external participants can’t join before the instructor.
Meeting participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left, unless they have meeting creation privileges to start a new meeting. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join again until an instructor restarts the nicknamed meeting.

Important: We recommend that you only assign meeting creation privileges, recording privileges, and live streaming privileges to the organizational units (OUs) that contain your faculty and staff members so that students will only be able to join meetings created by faculty or staff.

Better together: Using Meet inside Classroom

To improve the experience of using Classroom as a distance learning tool, we are rolling out a Meet integration to all Classroom users. This integration will only be available if Meet is turned on for the primary teacher in the class.

Using this integration, educators can create a unique Meet link for each class, which is displayed on the Classroom Stream and Classwork pages. The link acts as a dedicated meeting space for each class, making it easy for both teachers and students to join. Only teachers can access class settings to create the Meet link. All Meet links created by the Classroom integration are nicknamed links, so students can’t join without the instructor present.

To learn more, visit the Start a class video meeting page.

How Meet keeps your video conferences protected

Google is committed to building products that help protect student and educator privacy, and provide best-in-class security for your institution. Our default-on measures help keep your meetings secure, including:

Encrypting all data in transit by default between the client and Google for video meetings on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, and in meeting rooms with Google meeting room hardware.
Supporting compliance requirements around regulations including COPPA, FERPA, GDPR, and HIPAA.
Making it difficult to guess the ID of a meeting and make an unauthorized attempt to join it by using codes that are 10 characters long, with 25 characters in the set.
Leveraging Google Cloud’s defense-in-depth approach to security, which utilizes the built-in protections and global-private network that Google uses to secure your information and safeguard your privacy.

For tips on deploying Meet to your domain, visit the Meet security and privacy for education page.