Zoom Resources for Professors

Making Use of Virtual Teaching Tools

Heinrich Long is a privacy expert at Restore Privacy. Long says that, for college campuses, Zoom was an obvious choice for an alternative learning experience. “Classes where students have the availability to see each other and their professor in person are without a doubt better, but in many cases, we are left with hybrid scenarios,” he notes. In these cases, he says, “IT professionals working on college campuses need to understand these trends and help create online solutions that can work with Zoom in order to create broader leading solutions.”

Zoom, he says, can be used with other software to “enable the best forms of communication.”

Virtual and hybrid teaching strategies are different in many ways from traditional in-class teaching practices. Zoom resources for professors have driven a great deal of creativity over the past year—it’s a shift that is likely to continue even after pandemic fears have subsided.

Teachers, says Koh, “will need to up their game regarding technology to be at the level where the world wants, and frankly, expects them to be especially today.”

A Shift in Teaching Style

Koh predicts a major change in the teaching style that will be required in 2021 and beyond. “The future role of teachers would be focused on tasks requiring creativity, ingenuity, and flexibility in lesson dissemination,” he says.

The focus of teaching education will also shift, he says, gravitating more toward form (how to teach effectively using technology) rather than content (actual subject matter). “What to teach will definitely take a backseat to how to teach,” he says. “Teachers who understand and embrace this concept will make themselves better equipped to be the teachers of the future,” he says.

Adopting—and adapting to—hybrid teaching strategies is helping teachers to stay connected and students to stay engaged. Over the past several months a number of best practices have emerged for using virtual teaching tools and zoom resources.

Best Practice Tips for Teaching Hybrid Courses

The University of California, Berkeley has provided faculty with several best practices to enhance the virtual learning experience for students through Zoom, says Harsh Jadhav, an instructor at the university.

One of those tips: use nonverbal feedback features available through Zoom allowing meeting participants to place an icon by their name to communicate with the host and other participants without interrupting the flow of the meeting. For instance, a raise hand feature that lets the instructor know a student has a question.

The polling feature is another useful tool, allowing instructors to create single or multiple-choice polling questions. This can be a great tool to check in with students during class. Up to 25 polls can be set and saved for future use by creating a Zoom meeting template.

Ausel recommends some additional best practices for using Zoom for teaching hybrid college classes:

• Set waiting room or password security
• Recommend, but don’t require students to turn cameras on during class
• Use a good video conferencing backdrop
• Have a plan for Zoom interactions to keep students engaged, taking maximum advantage of all of the Zoom resources for professors that are available
• Depending on class size, decide early on how you will track/report attendance, so the task is manageable
• Become fluent with the meeting interface—especially participant and security controls

Hybrid teaching strategies are here to stay. Professors have learned how to quickly adapt to the new environment, whether synchronous, asynchronous, fully remote, hybrid, or some combination of all of the above.

Leveraging all of the functionality now available to seamlessly connect with students has allowed learning to continue despite the challenges schools have faced. And, in fact, the available technology has also led to new insights that can be used for all types of classes in any range of formats, for students—and professors—who may be located anywhere.