Thompson Rivers University got into full swing last week and it didn’t take long for technological issues to arise.

TRU’s Director of Learning Technology Brian Lamb says on Wednesday, the first full day of classes, the video conferencing system had a high rate of poor video quality and even network crashes.

“Usage was definitely a huge factor. That video conferencing system is hosted in Vancouver on a data centre that hosts a lot of applications for higher education across the province and a number of applications out of that data centre were impacted. So there was a need for systemic upgrades as well.”

Lamb says there would have been instances where an entire class would have been asked to turn cameras on which then sends the video feed to the entire group.

“Because there’s 30 different people with cameras on they’re sending a video feed to 30 other people. It’s the old hand shake problem. How many hand shakes at a party, if you had 30 people at a party and everyone needed to shake hands with everyone else, there would be 870 hand shakes. There would be 870 video feeds going if 30 people turned their cameras on at once.”

“I think there was a huge amount of usage on the first day and a lot of usage for people using the system for the first time which causes issues as well.”

“We take it very seriously and we are working as hard as we can to give people a learning environment where they feel safe and they can rely on the tools that they need to do what they need to do.”

Lamb says the first steps included short term system boosts and it asked the school community to try and use less video to reduce the strain on the system. The hope is to have everything completely sorted out to begin next week.