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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

Online courses lack class discussions that are key to making courses engaging.

This sounds absolutely nothing like how things worked in the online degree I received.

I don't know what is typical elsewhere. I will say, from watching my son's Zoom-based classroom sessions, that Zoom seems to be almost specifically designed to yield a poor classroom experience. For reasons that I believe would also apply to Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. I am glad that my school used a meeting platform that was intended for educational use.

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Agreed. I got my MSLIS from UIUC's online program; I enrolled in 2006 and was a member of their 11th cohort, so they had already been doing online learning for a decade by the time I attended. They really had things figured out. Online students paid the same tuition as on-campus students.

We attended synchronous online lectures while logged into an IRC server. You could listen to the lecture and chat with classmates about it in real-time as it was happening without interrupting the lecture, and it was delightful and extremely engaging. Frankly, I found it superior to the in-person class meetings I had in undergrad.

Also, class discussions are hardly the only way to engage learners, there are all kinds of active learning techniques that can be employed. In my own teaching, I'm personally fond of using live polling tools to ask formative assessment questions. Many online meeting tools have features for things like breakout sessions where you can ask students to do a think/pair/share.

If a student is not engaged in an online learning environment, I think that points more to instructors not being prepared to teach in that setting rather than an inherent limitation of the setting itself.

Back in the day when online learning was channels on Community Antenna TeleVision systems reserved for Community Colleges, I was studying the digital bandwidth required for online learning via telecommunications.

Although I don't have a reference, I found a study by a German university that compared classes delivered by television with classes delivered with a combination of sound, pictures, graphics and text.

The result was that the latter was as effective as video for all categories of classes, even those teaching kinetic skills such as golf and tennis.

Moving pictures, especially those of the head and shoulders of a professor delivering a lecture, are completely unnecessary.

I think that the key to online learning is the care and expertise with which the content is developed, especially the narrative, pictures, graphics, and reference material, as well as the design and effective use of collaboration tools by the TAs and students.

What meeting platform did your school use? Which school?

My university was using Adobe Connect almost a decade ago. It is way better than video call apps like Zoom.

I couldn't disagree more. Connect is written in Flash and has serious stability issues. For better or for worse Zoom is stable and intuitive for adult learning.

I don't care to weigh in on any questions about how it's built. I also didn't experience any stability problems, but this was admittedly a while ago now, and the product may have subsequently taken a turn for the worse.

As far as the user experience goes, though, I would say that Adobe Connect makes it possible to create an online classroom in a way that just isn't possible in Zoom.

Which is in no way contradictory to the idea that Zoom is stable and intuitive for adult learning. "Adult learning" is a wide net that covers a lot of learning situations that do not necessarily involve or benefit from a classroom environment. YouTube and printed books are also stable and intuitive for adult learning.

But, for educators who are scrambling to adapt their pre-existing curricula to distance learning, I would argue that preserving as many elements as possible from the working environment that they're used to is pretty key to giving them the best chance possible at a successful transition.

I'm not a Cisco employee nor am I married to WebEx in every way, but I do a mix of IT support and media production at a university and WebEx has been very useful for us so far.

From what I've experienced, Zoom is like a basic WebEx "Meeting" where you join a conference and it's an online approximation of a conference room. WebEx has a subsection called WebEx "Events" with a few minor tweaks that make it more useful for classes or seminars.

Mainly it's just about how they set up "roles". In a Meeting, you're all mostly the same (aside from the host). In an Event, you schedule the thing, add a list of people who will be "panelists", and then they get a special password that allows them to log in with their WebEx account and join with elevated privileges.

The "host" role is still the "admin" and can change settings and assign roles. The "panelists" can turn on their own mics and cameras as they choose, and they can be given screen-share rights.

Everyone else gets a different link and joins as "attendees". Attendees can't turn on their own mics or cameras. They can post in the chat box and they can raise their hand to be given mic rights. It effectively prevents the issues of "bombing" online meetings with disruptive behavior and allows the presenters to do the teaching.

Zoom has the same feature called Webinars

> Zoom is like a basic WebEx "Meeting"

Zoom has the same features as the Webex Events in their zoom "Webinar", with separate logins for admins ("hosts") and panelists, q&a chat box etc.

Of course it's not free like Zoom meetings, but costs $300 or more - that's where they make their money... https://zoom.us/buy?plan=pro&from=webinar

Cool, thanks for the info. We don't do as much with Zoom since our WebEx license covers Events and hosting recorded videos (among other things) but it's still good to know.

I've only used Zoom in the basic/meetings sense. Seems like a rough parity between the two (which makes sense given their origin, I'd imagine).

Please share the meeting platform used so that everybody else can start looking at it and perhaps lobby their schools or school boards.

My kids' schools used both Zoom and Google Meets, and schools converged back to Zoom. If there's truly something better would love to hear and share!

Adobe Connect

What was the difference that yielded the positive experience?

To an approximation, the entire user interface and everything about how it worked.

Edit: A more wordy response, since I assume the downvote implies that wasn't satisfying --

It has all the key elements - video chat, screen sharing, whiteboarding, etc., but they've all been arranged in such a different way that it's just impossible to single anything out in particular. The best I could do is explain it by analogy: Most software is designed to work best as either an online equivalent to a conference room, or an online equivalent to a lecture hall. But, IRL, a classroom isn't quite like a conference room or a lecture hall. Depending on the type of classroom, the physical differences might be subtle, but they are pervasive.

well, that doesn't tell anything.

You have to keep in mind, if they aren’t a UI designer, then aren’t trained to pinpoint they key factors of an interface that make it different. They just know one feels better than the other.

IMO this is where UX often goes wrong, many people have a feeling for something but they don’t have the terminology to articulate it, nor the skills to reproduce it another context.

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