Webex: Students

Webex, a Colonial Connect service, is available to all GW students, faculty and staff. Webex is a collaborative meeting tool that allows for real-time video meetings and sharing of computer content over the web. Features include multi-point video conferencing and desktop share to meet for a group project, catch up with friends or make a video call home.

Students can host Webex meetings for free using a computer, smart phone or tablet and a headset or speakers to participate in the audio portion of the meeting. Student hosted meetings can support up to 1,000 attendees. Students may attend WebEx meetings hosted by faculty and staff for free; any fees will be charged to the meeting host. Fee-based Webex hosting with long distance or toll-free calling service is not available for students.

Faculty, staff, students and guests of the university may all be invited to and attend Webex meetings on either the faculty and staff domain or the student domain. If you are hosting, simply invite your attendees by email address in the Webex tool. To begin using your Webex account, login to gwstudent.webex.com with your UserID and corresponding password.

In May, Webex Meetings users will start receiving prompts to update to the latest version of the Webex Client. For more information, please see "Switching from Webex Meetings Client to the new Webex Client".

Webex Best Practices

Monitoring - Due to circumstances resulting from COVID-19 (coronavirus disease), a historic number of employees are rapidly transitioning to remote work. Webex meetings have never been more vital for staying connected. This is also putting a tremendous strain on regional internet service providers and telephony providers which may result in telephony incidents or service degradation at certain peak times.

Here are a few tips to get the best meeting experience in any situation:

Disconnect from your VPN: GW provides a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service that allows you to access the University network while working remotely. You can use Webex Meetings outside of VPN for the best experience.
Choose audio over video: Webex will suggest or automatically lower your resolution and may eventually turn off your video to adapt to your network quality. You can choose to do this yourself at any time. Learn more about improving your experience by eliminating video here.
Build in breaks: You can get a faster join experience by joining 5 minutes early or, better yet, schedule meetings on the 15th or 45th minute of the hour.
Switch to call-in audio: If your internet audio and video experience or call me/call back does not work, you can keep collaborating. Call in using the dial-in numbers in your meeting invitation to join via your cell phone or landline. If the primary phone number that is provided is temporarily unavailable, the invitation includes a long list of other global call-in numbers you can try. Learn more about opting for call-in audio here.
Hosting a meeting: Although Personal Meeting Rooms (PMR) are convenient, they do so at the expense of having a more secure access path to the room unless specifically addressed by the user. Learn more about scenarios and features that can be used by hosts to secure meeting rooms.

Webex Best Practices

Other Helpful Links for Webex