Starting Monday, March 16, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso will have Google Meet as an Institutional tool for academic and administrative videocalls. This, after other platforms presented, during the last months, operational difficulties mainly associated to changes and updates that affected its functioning.
Jorge Mendoza, Vicerector of Development at the PUCV, explained that the purpose of this decision is to have a platform that will deliver optimal service to the university community. “The decision was made after a responsible and strategic assessment that included analyzing the available alternatives to ensure stability and quality for the different activities”, the Vicerector added.
“This responds to a long-term strategic vision, aimed to strengthen a digital ecosystem that is integrated, coherent and sustainable for the academic work. Google Meet is a native part of Google Workspace, a platform that we already use throughout the PUCV – institutional e-mail, calendar, Drive, Documents, among others – which allows us to simplify the use of tools, improve the interoperability and reduce technological friction in everyday operations” Mendoza stated.
Additionally, and in order to optimize and enrich the Meet user experience, the community will be able to access features supported by artificial intelligence through Gemini, integrated into the institutional Google account.
“Among these capabilities we include the generation of automatic meeting summaries, facilitating follow up and review of covered contents. Also, automatic subtitles will be used as support in meetings carried out in other languages, allowing its translation to the selected language. This will contribute to a more inclusive and flexible experience”, Mendoza explained.
From the Information and Communication Services Office (DSIC, for its name in spanish), they mentioned that “the essential functionalities used in Zoom have their counterpart in Google Meet, maintaining adequate standards for synchronic teaching, meetings and recordings”.
In this context, they added that a key difference is the management of recording storage. “In Google Meet, recordings are stored in each user's institutional account, depending on the available storage space,” they added.
Regarding the historical recordings in Zoom, these should be downloaded for backup, staying available upon request to the DSIC for a period of six months, in order to ensure academic continuity and protection of relevant information.
In this process, users will have the support of the DSIC Support team, as well as a practical guide that will explain how to access and use the main functionalities of Google Meet in the teaching context.
In addition, as Google incorporates new tools or improvements aimed to facilitate and enhance the Meet experience, these will be timely assessed, communicated and enabled by the University, always with the focus on supporting its work.
Strategic Communication Deparment
