Limitations of Zoom in Education
Zoom is arguably one of the best web conferencing platforms available. But it was designed more for live, one-off meetings than for recurring classes or lectures. Some of the things that you might want to do in a teaching platform you simply won’t be able to do in Zoom.
For example:
Notetaking: Unless students have large screens or external monitors, taking notes during a Zoom meeting requires that they frequently switch back and forth between Zoom and whatever program they use to take notes. There only work around is to connect to a Zoom meeting on a separate device than the one used to take notes. For example, students could connect to a meeting on the Zoom mobile app and take notes on their desktop.
Pre-loading content: In a traditional learning management system like Sakai, you can access your course site before the semester begins, change the site’s layout and appearance, upload documents and assignments, and more. You cannot do any of those things in Zoom. Zoom is simply a live web conferencing platform that lets you share your web camera and screen with others.
Testing/Exams: While Zoom has a polling tool, it does not have a testing or exam tool. If you want to give your students a graded assessment, you will need to use an external tool like Sakai.
Attendance Reporting: Zoom can create a report showing who attended a particular Zoom meeting, but that report is hidden. Go to https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/account/my/report, search for a meeting within a one-month window, and then click on that meeting’s number of participants in the “Participants” column.
Breakout Rooms: Unfortunately, there is no way to pre-populate your breakout rooms with content or instructions before class begins. In addition, when your class meeting ends the breakout rooms that you create in Zoom disappear and will not appear in your next class meeting. Unfortunately, we are not aware of any workaround.
File-Sharing: While you can share files using the Chat box, Zoom meetings are not really meant to be file repositories. The largest file you can share is 512 MB. Tip: If you want to create a file repository for your course, use Box or Sakai.
Polling: If a poll contains multiple questions, your students must answer all of the questions and then click submit before Zoom will record any of the students’ answers. In addition, only single-choice or multiple-choice questions are allowed.
Whiteboarding: Zoom’s Whiteboard (see Sharing a Whiteboard) is an effective tool for summarizing key points during discussions, but the button students click to download a screenshot of the whiteboard is hidden. While the whiteboard is on the screen, the students have to click the View Options pull-down list at the top of the whiteboard and then click Annotate. Only then will they see a Save button