Ubiquitous Learning and Instructional Technologies MOOC’s Updates
Zoom's Video and Web Conferencing Technology as a Virtual Classroom
Zoom is a powerful virtual tool to replace today's classroom and conference meetings and pave the way for the future of learning or meeting at a distance. It got even more popular especially since last year when Covid19 hits the world. There is only one word that greatly describes Zoom, which is "Convenience". With Zoom, you can meet online and organize meetings where both students and teachers are able to meet face-to-face via their webcams and while in a corporation setting, you can even hold important conference meetings online with a password-protected virtual room. Zoom allows up to 100 participants per room by default in each meeting for the free version and even up to a 1000 with some yearly paid add-on plans which are still very affordable to educators and the working sector. Learning things has never been easier and more convenient than this where you can do it at the comfort of home and save lots of travel time between locations. It does not just encourage live lessons and meetings, the videos can even be recorded for absentees. This goes to show how much of a difference technology has provided us with not just in this day but also in this situation where it is preferred to stay at home.
Other references:
https://zoom.us/pricing
https://www.technology.pitt.edu/blog/zoom
The use of break-out rooms is also great as you can set students group work during lessons and allow more interaction in small groups rather than having them just listen to the teacher lecturing.
I'd say Zoom has never been ever relevant in today's context of Covid-19. Both circumstance and application of such internet service/application has been used to overcome the limitations that Covid-19 has set upon conventional physical classroom environments.
There might be disagreements of different school of thoughts but I agree that at this point of time we all have to make the best out of it and leverage on such technologies.