Monash University spends over 1 billion combined minutes on Zoom

Comprised of 86,000 current students and 17,000 staff working across 150 active fields of research, Monash University is ranked among the top 1% of universities worldwide. 

With 6 locations in Australia and an increasing number of campuses, partner universities, and remote learning offerings globally, Monash is actively growing. As the director of support services and engagement, Matt Carmichael is tasked with building and maintaining a technology service delivery capability that supports Monash University’s current needs as well as its vision for the future.

“We are an international university and we want to push that international approach and model even further. International for us means we need to be borderless,” Matt said.

Early adopters

Back in 2017, long before the pandemic hit, Monash had already started experimenting with Zoom as a video conferencing tool. Their traditional system involved booking a specific room and required a full-time employee to set everything up. Staff then had to pack up and travel across campus — which could take up to 15 minutes each way — just to dial in. Seeking an easier, ‘just works’ system that could enable staff to join from anywhere, a colleague suggested they try Zoom. 

Matt took the opportunity to learn more about the Zoom platform through AARNet, Zoom’s long-term partner in Australian education. The benefits were clear, and with AARNet providing local support along with extensive hosting and education experience backed by Zoom’s rapidly growing global presence and features, it was clear Zoom was the ideal platform for moving forward.

“With each Zoom meeting, you could get half an hour back in your day. If you’ve got three or four meetings a day, that’s a significant amount of time. And if you multiply that across thousands of staff members, that’s a big chunk of time we’re saving,” Matt said.

Matt and his team increased their use of the platform, first with Webinars, and now with over 2,000 staff members also using Zoom Phone.

“We’re now seeing a spread of the Zoom concept and the Zoom design into more and more of our spaces just to simplify the user experience and make it more efficient. What that creates is a uniform experience wherever our students and academic or professional staff members go on our campuses,” Matt said. 

In fact, Zoom is so much embedded in the culture at Monash that in 2021 alone they racked up 3.8 million Zoom meetings with 17 million participant connections, totaling 1.05 billion combined minutes.

Enhancing a good reputation with the right technology

Matt’s team’s value proposition is “engage, enable, and empower,” so reliability and ease of use are key factors to consider when choosing the right communication and collaboration technology.

“If we’re doing large parts of our job properly, we are invisible. Students and educators are engaging in our services and they work seamlessly,” Matt said.

Zoom provides students and staff with a reliable tool and a simple user interface that requires minimal set-up and troubleshooting. This means that teachers, researchers, and professional staff have more time to invest in the things they were originally employed to do, providing a supportive and enjoyable work environment where they can thrive.

“There’s an ecosystem here. If we have really good researchers staying and doing great research, we get great write-ups, great citations, and great papers which lifts our world rankings, which brings more students, which enables us to continue investing in technology and enabling services that go back into that ecosystem,” Matt explained.

Making the most of Zoom

While previous suppliers were unable to provide analytic capabilities, Zoom and AARNet enabled Matt’s team with the tools to quickly identify and fix issues.

“Before, someone would say, ‘there’s something wrong, can you fix it,’ and it was like a needle in a haystack. But with Zoom, whether it’s connection problems or something else, we can easily identify and resolve any issues,” Matt said.

Features like closed captioning, recording capabilities, reactions, and breakout rooms are all widely utilised across various Monash campuses, and Zoom Phone in particular is playing a big role in the organisation’s transition to remote working.

With plans to enhance remote and hybrid learning capabilities, the university is also beginning to explore Zoom’s Meeting SDK and take advantage of applications such as Kahoot on the Zoom App Marketplace. 

Building a future with a strategic partner

“It’s not just the application that’s been really good — the support both Zoom and AARNet have provided to our organisation has been exceptional for us,” Matt said. “When you’re talking about a billion minutes of Zoom meetings per year, we want and need support.”

As Monash continues to grow its educational offering internationally, the ability to communicate with Zoom engineers about what’s coming up on their roadmap has been invaluable. “The partnership between Zoom and AARNet has proposed and brought to education hundreds of new features over the past nine years,” said Geoff Lambert, a Zoom specialist at AARNet. “As Australia’s largest university, Monash is one of the key universities we listen to. Importantly, it’s been clear that Zoom listens, too.”

“We don’t view all of our suppliers as vendors,” Matt noted. “Some of them are partners — strategic partners in our direction for the future. Zoom in particular has played a really important part in that strategic partnership approach.”

After adopting Zoom ahead of the masses and then utilising its tools to thrive under pandemic conditions, Monash University is now expanding. By continuing to embrace innovation, aligning with education resellers such as AARNet, and partnering with Zoom to build simple, reliable, and versatile collaborations, the university is well on its way toward a bright future of borderless, hybrid learning on a global scale.