Future of the Workforce

The global COVID-19 Pandemic caused tremendous stress in many facets of our existence from global shifts to daily life-altering impacts. Most significantly, the pandemic caused many people and organizations to rethink how they worked, that is, the pandemic was a forcing function. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Zoomiversity: A Case Study of Pandemic Effects on Post-secondary Teaching and Learning

The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit North America in March 2020, disrupting personal and professional lives, and leading to work-from-home mandates in many jurisdictions. In this paper, we examine two years of empirical network traffic measurement data from the University of Calgary’s campus network to study the effects of the pandemic on a post-secondary education environment. Our study focuses on the online meeting applications and services used, as well as traffic volumes, directionality, and diurnal patterns, as observed from our campus edge network. The main highlights from our study include: changes to inbound and outbound traffic volumes;reduced traffic asymmetry;significant growth in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and VPN traffic;structural changes in workday traffic patterns;and a more global distribution of campus network users. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.