Featured Article from Conferencing

Zoom Delivers Classroom Experience for Online Students with Conferencing

By Michael Guta
Contributing Writer

Schools of higher learning around the world are now offering online classes that can be accessed from virtually anywhere. This has made it possible for students to take courses that may not be available in their city, state or even country. But as more students enroll online, they want to have the same classroom experience as students that are physically present in the school. The Zoom platform is allowing professors across the country to use video conferencing so online students can attend, participate and engage in the lectures or lessons that are being provided.

As reported by Hannah Jeffers-Huser on Emporia State University's news organization The Bulletin, students and professors are using the conferencing capability of Zoom to learn and collaborate with each other in and out of the classroom.

Jeffers-Huser quotes Rachel Spaulding, assistant professor for English, modern languages and journalism, on how the platform is being applied, “It has a lot of embedded features in the sense that you can meet virtually face-to-face in a one-on-one kind of way…You can have five, six (or) seven people on the same conference call and their faces are going to appear on the screen as they interact with the other people on the other side of the screen.”

Zoom provides software-based collaboration for the conference room with HD video and audio that allows participants to meet with anyone on their desktop, mobile devices and conference room systems with H.323/SIP interoperability and communicate with any legacy endpoint, including Polycom (News - Alert), Cisco and Lifesize. Meetings can be initiated with voice command at the touch of a single button or scheduled through calendar systems.

Zoom is used by over 80 percent of the top 200 U.S. universities, with more than 5,300 higher education customers. The California State University (CSU) system is one of the institutions, which implemented the Zoom platform in February of 2016, providing the 21 CSU campuses and around 400,000 students, faculty, and staff with a unified platform for video, audio, and collaboration.

One of the features Zoom offers is Video Breakout Rooms, which lets hosts of Zoom meetings essentially break large meeting or training sessions into smaller groups. This is ideal for schools that have students taking classes online and in the classroom. Whether it is study groups or teams in a company, the host can address each small group within the context of the whole. And just like other groups in Zoom, these small groups can use video, audio, chat, whiteboards, and screen sharing to collaborate.