The Coronavirus outbreak across the world has rendered many services unable to continue in their traditional sense. An important one is that of education as schools and colleges have shut down in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown across the globe.
As students sit at home waiting for their schools and colleges to reopen, some schools in India are adopting technology solutions to impart knowledge to their students remotely. Here are some of the platforms that help enable such schools study remotely:
Last year, Microsoft came up with its own communication platform that lets people of a group join together in a video conference and share their views on a topic. Teams has proven to be a perfect platform for conducting online classes during such troubled times.
While its use started as a contingency plan, Microsoft Teams now enables several schools within Delhi to let their teachers conduct classes through a video conference at times when the schools are shut. Before the COVID-19 lockdown, this was observed during the month of November last year when Delhi schools and colleges were shut citing high air pollution levels.
Even before the current lockdown, schools like The British School, had already started using the platform for online teaching. An important distinction that teachers note with platforms like Teams is while a straight up online course on e-learning platforms lacks the much sought human interaction, communication gateways like Microsoft Teams help enable that by letting the students and the teachers interact with each other in real time.
Microsoft also allows the use of some other tools on top of Teams that help in online teaching. These include Microsoft Forms and document sharing as well as the virtual whiteboard for teachers. These are just a few of many such tools.
An important part of the Google Suite, the video conferencing app is another that enables remote learning through online video conferences between students and teachers. Hangouts is known for its fast and lightweight interface as it enables a smart management of video call participants, popping up the video of the person speaking at any given time.
In essence, the platform works the same as Microsoft Teams. A group of students can get on a video call with their teacher and collectively listen to a lecture online. In the midst, students can also put in their opinions through a chat window.
Interestingly, learning experience through Hangouts can be further enhanced by using other apps from GSuite, including Classroom, a platform designed specifically for teachers to better manage their classrooms and students and their performances over time, all online.
One of the most popular video conferencing services available also focuses on student groups and has specific packages for the same. As USPs for online teaching, Zoom promises features like session recording and transcription, collaboration features including one-click sharing, real-time co-annotation as well as digital whiteboarding, integration with Moodle, Canvas, Desire2Learn, Sakai and Blackboard and even more.
Zoom as an online teaching tool has been used in many top-notch Universities including the likes of Santa Clara University, Drexel University, Brexel University of California and many more. As the trend of online classes gains steam, Zoom is expected to be used by the Indian schools and colleges too!
A visit to the website claims that 95% of the schools in the US use ClassDojo for teaching their students online. Interestingly, while others focus on being video conferencing platforms, ClassDojo comes as a complete tool specifically designed for teaching. That is also why it gives a holistic connect between the students, teachers as well as the parents.
Through the platform, parents can join an ongoing class at anytime using their own devices. Similarly, students can showcase and share their learning by adding photos and videos to their own portfolios. In addition, there are ample tools for the teachers to manage the studies being imparted in the classroom.
As of Feb. 10, schools in over 300 cities across 30 provinces in China joined the ¡°Online Classroom¡± program by Alibaba¡¯s enterprise messaging app DingTalk, with 50 million participating students joining virtual classrooms conducted by 600,000 teachers in China using the live-streaming service of DingTalk to conduct online classes. This is another app that you can check and try for your e-learning virtual classroom environment.