On the Quality of Experience of Content Sharing in Online Education and Online Meetings

Abstract

The turn of the decade introduced a new era of global pandemics to the world through the appearance of COVID-19, which is still an active crisis at the time of this paper. As a countermeasure, the phenomena of home office and online education became not only widely available, but also mandatory in many countries. However, the performance, reliability and general usability of such real-time activities may be severely affected by unfavorable network conditions. In both contexts, content sharing is now a common practice, and the success of the related use cases may fundamentally depend on it. In this paper, we present our surveys and subjective studies on the Quality of Experience of content sharing in online education and online meetings. A total of 6 surveys and 5 experiments are detailed, addressing topics of student experience, user interface settings, sharing options of lecturers and employees of the private sector, the perceivable effects of network impairments and the related long-term adaptation, the rubber band effect of slide sharing, the overall perceived quality and the separate quality aspects of media loading times, and the preference between visual quality, average frame rate and frame rate uniformity. The findings of the subjective studies do not characterize the use cases of the investigated topics on a general, widely-applicable level, as only a single online platform is involved throughout the experiments. However, their experimental configurations are reinforced by comprehensive surveys and many results indicate statistically significant differences between the selected test conditions.