Zoom is a now a popular app in the education circles in Uganda and world over. In the last 2 years of the pandemic, zoom usage grew tremendously and as 2021 closes, it is the most used video conferencing app with a 50% share of the market. At the height of the pandemic, statistics show that there were over 90,000 schools using zoom with the app being downloaded 485 million times in 2020.
It is therefore no doubt that when Senior1.org organised a 1 month orientation program, zoom was the obvious choice for its live lessons. All the lessons, career guidance sessions and debates were held via zoom before being uploaded to the senior1.org YouTube channel.
However, it has been noticed that while the numbers are high when a zoom session starts, they drastically drop after an hour or about there. A lesson that starts with 70 learners will go to as low as 20. Why? We went on a simple survey to ask why people dropped off and we we found out that the major cause was lack of data.
So, how much do you really need to sustain an hour of zoom?
We went on a fact finding session to determine how much data was actually needed for a 1 hour lesson. We loaded 2,000 UGX of airtime and subscribed for 300 MB of data on our official Airtel contact. We used a Samsung S7 edge as our gadget and attended a lesson that started at 10:15 am and the findings were amazing.
Of the 300MB, we had used only 120 MB of data by the end of the lesson which lasted 1 hour and 5 minutes. We were now left with 180 MBs which would ideally be enough to attend another 1 hour lesson and also leave room for a learner to download all their new NCDC learners books.
So, ideally, if one doesn’t subscribe to any promo bundles, it was found out that a learner needed just 2,000 UGX to attend 2 lessons of 1 hour each. If a learner were to attend all our new curriculum lessons, they would need just 30,000 UGX for the entire month. The challenge however would be how to fight the temptation to use only and only Zoom on your gadget. This calls for a bundle that can be controlled by your ISP.
In our next article, I will share with you an even cheaper way to attend zoom lessons using Airtel’s learn from home bundles.
