At the Insurance Institute of Canada, we are committed to putting our people first. With COVID-19 upon us, and everyone having to shift to a work or learn at home landscape, we understand that this shift can be overwhelming. We wanted to take a moment to let you know the proactive steps we are taking to ensure our stakeholder’s safety within our virtual learning environments.
Disclaimer: This document reflects our best knowledge at the time of writing and will be continually updated to incorporate new elements as they surface.
While attempting to build increasing readiness and adoption of virtual technologies to better enable remote work and learning. We are working to make sure that we have the right infrastructure, knowledge and best practices in place to ensure your success and safety while using the technology we have implemented.
With any virtual technology platform, there are several best practices that we have considered to ensure user safety and security. These practices include;
- All virtual classrooms require a password to enter.
- No virtual classroom allows for participants to join before the instructor.
- Only the instructor can share the screen and promote a participant to be able to do so.
- A waiting room is enabled so that if a participant is not a registered participant, the instructor has the capacity to allow the user in and remove them if needed.
We have implemented these practices that will help reduce exposure to any unwanted guests entering a virtual
classroom.
To play your role in being as safe and secure as possible, here are some of the things we highly recommend you keep in mind when participating in any virtual meeting/classroom.
- Don’t share links to teleconferences or classrooms via social media posts. - Unwanted intruders may join the meeting which may have a negative impact on your experience.
- Don’t use video on a call if you don’t need to - Using video is not a requirement for your meetings or classes, turning off your webcam and listening in via audio prevents possible social engineering efforts to learn more about you through background objects. Audio-only also saves network bandwidth on an internet connection, improving the overall audio and visual quality of the meeting.
- Use the latest version of the software - Security vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited more often on older software versions. Double-check that you are using the most up-to-date version available.
- Do not post pictures of your meetings or classes - If you take a picture of your meeting/classroom, then anyone who sees this picture will be able to see its associated meeting ID. This ID can then be used by hackers/uninvited people to try and gain unauthorized access to the meeting/class by manually joining via the displayed ID
- Don’t click on unexpected or unfamiliar links in meetings - Just like in email or on the internet, clicking on links may have an undesirable effect on your computer system and can expose your system to hackers/uninvited people.
Of course, we will monitor all notifications and changed to our selected virtual classroom solutions and amend and adjust these guidelines at regular intervals as any changes in the technology develop.