COVID-19 struck us all with little warning.

Most of our educational institutions remained shut down for prolonged period. It made our Educators turn to Zoom, Google Meet like video-conferencing applications to train students online.

But, none of those video-conferencing tools were originally designed for formal education. In other words, they are all for general virtual meetings, in their original forms. They do lack one or more of the marked features of Student-Teacher communication in the learning-teaching cycle.

Like?

• proper interactivity between teacher & students in a higher-sized class.
• peer-interaction among students that’s a core feature of education.
• engagement issues where a teacher may not even know that her/his students are distracted.
• reduced scope for group activities, participation & collaboration.
• evaluation of students.
• proper attendance-marking.

So, do we have better tools now?

Just like how necessity is the mother of invention, new requirements have always driven Technology. In simpler words, Yes!

Here’s a list of 4 new tools, conceived and implemented exclusively for online classes:

Class Technologies is a simple solution built on top of Zoom. It is ideal for school-level online classes.

Engageli platform is suitable for higher education, with advanced features for group discussions, collaboration and higher engagement.

Top Hat specializes in asynchronous content delivery, targeting international students across time zones.

InSpace, staying true to its name, allows movement in the virtual class room, along with a few other high-tech VR features like proximity-based audio.

That’s it?

Well, we all know that online classes are here to stay! There’s a lot of tech players in this domain, offering richer features and applications in the immediate feature. So, stay tuned because this field is certain to take revolutionary changes.