In March 2020, after the introduction of a high alert mode and the transfer of schools to a remote mode of operation, a small group of system administrators opened a hunting season for an outlandish beast called “Distance learning”. People who worked in classrooms for a long time were forced to start working from home.
In this article, I do not want to go into the details of how teachers were trained and technical support was provided in the #BetterHome mode. The more important task, in my opinion, was the choice of a platform for distance learning. The main problem in the framework of distance education was caused by the banal unpreparedness of institutions for the transition to Online. If the schools had more time, the picture would look much better. Although there are already a lot of stories about who has bugs and "it's generally easier to communicate in the WhatsApp chat".
Under the cut, you will find a story about how we chose a platform for remote learning for our students.
Selection of applicants
Let's move on from lyrics to facts. At first we wanted to understand in general what the options are. In September 2019, researchers from Gartner studied different platforms for online meetings and named 4 leading companies and their tools in this area: Cisco (WebEx), Zoom, Microsoft (Teams), LogMeIn. Also, 2 more companies were close to the leaders: Google (Hangouts) and Adobe (Connect). I had to immediately delete from this list services that do not have free access, since public procurement is an adventure for at least 2 months. Remains Zoom, Teams, Hangouts and WebEx. It should be noted that WebEx was provided free of charge to educational organizations for a period of 90 days due to the pandemic. That is, it's more about a free trial period. But, he, nevertheless, is.
And here the torment began, how to choose a product that is right for our institution, what are the advantages and disadvantages of each decision. The first thing that I understood for myself was that our solution must meet one important requirement: "Ease of use."
We decided to explore WebEx first. Initially, this decision was made on the "wow effect": a full-fledged enterprise solution from Cisco for our huge institution, free for 90 days, and even with a good list of advantages. It even has student attention tracking.
But my joy was quickly overshadowed by one very critical point - "Integration with Learning Management Systems." A little Google and we come to the conclusion that in order to fully launch WebEx, we need to integrate all this with the LMS (learning management system), and even train a huge number of teachers to use the two systems, fill the LMS with content, and put it all in week. All other things being equal, it was possible to make the whole bundle "fly", but not in such a short time.
The next product to catch my eye is Google Hangouts + Classroom. It seems that this is it - a solution that should save the situation. The Classroom itself was designed specifically for schools. There are all the required functions: publishing materials, assignments, tracking student progress. Up to communication with parents. But there were also several moments that overshadowed the choice of the solution. For example, a shared folder is created for a class on Google Drive and is available to the entire class. This minus ruined everything, because we did not want to allow any kind of manipulation of information by students. It was necessary to achieve a level playing field.
2 finalists
As a result, I have only two services left that need to be touched in just a couple of days and put into production: Teams and Zoom. Comparing them is problematic because Zoom does not have a free education package, and Teams is included in the free Office 365 education package with A1 plan. But we tried.
Here's what we found when talking about the pros and cons of both systems.
In Teams available we get:
- Auto Graded Tests in Forms
- Create digital stories with Sway (interactive)
- Broadcasts
- Video service for creating, managing, and sharing videos securely across your organization, meaning all lecture recordings are stored in Teams
- Rights management, data loss prevention and encryption
And in Zoom:
- Simultaneous screen sharing and video calling
- Virtual background
- Screen sharing of any iPad / iPhone application
- Joint comments on the shared screen
- Sharing via message board
- Multi-user sharing
And no matter how beautifully advertisements and brochures broadcast to us, there are also disadvantages. Felt on your own skin. Unfortunately, there is no reference solution for a specific situation and time, and this was immediately clear.
What are the disadvantages of Teams
- Insufficient flexibility of the interface: there is no way to control the displayed images, that is, we see the picture of only the last 4 speakers
- Slow update of information in commands
- Intuitively incomprehensible (complex) interface, in which it is quite difficult to figure it out right away
- Various system administration problems, hello PowerShell
- Lacks functionality of webinar platforms
Again cons, now Zoom:
- The free version supports only 40 minutes for one webinar, and we remember with you that the lesson at school is 45 minutes
- For each webinar you need to create your own link
- For comfortable and safe work, a large number of settings are required, and they will have to be done every time, and not all teachers are ready to master the subtleties of the settings and repeat them every lecture
- There is no possibility of mass unloading of users
- Complex interface
- Problems with mailing (spam filters)
I attributed this to the main disadvantages of the service, I was also, of course, afraid that due to the increased demand for the service, it either would not pull the load, or would limit access to its free features. Although, as practice has shown, two points of the minuses really "shot" Hello Youtube and #ZOOMBOMBING.
How it was decided to proceed
As a result
Teams.
I proceeded from the solutions available to us, the timing of implementation, the peculiarities of the internal cuisine of the organization of education for more than 35,000 students, as well as in practice of interaction with teachers and students. Now let's look at the points:
- I needed the most scalable solution that includes SSO, with an implementation without touching on-premises AD
- The ability to globally unload users in a "pack" to a specific location
- Statistics / reporting
- Control of teachers / students
- Implementation speed
- Minimizing the burden on the IT department and further support
- Safety and stability of work
And yes, all the functionality in one form or another is present in different editions of the platforms, but for each specific case you need to choose your ideal solution.
My colleague Evgenia, who during this period held our webinars teaching work on the Zoom and Teams platform for teachers in the city of Moscow, says: “The first ones who suffered from remote work are those areas that need synchronization. For example, musicians, where the orchestras cannot sound at the same time, choirs, and dancers, where the movements are asynchronous. This is due to the fact that any platforms only process information, but the rate of receipt of this information from each user is different. This is how the delay occurs, who has a faster Internet connection, from that information (in this case, video) arrives faster, and he already, for example, sings (in the case of a choir), but another person who also performs in this choir , but the Internet is weak (the speed is lower than the previous one),then the information (video) from him will arrive on ANY platform with a delay. "
Also, the inconvenience of using the platforms was experienced by creative people such as artists. The inconvenience was caused by the fact that they could not show their palette (when the colors were mixing) and the easel at the same time, they had to use two devices to display the video.
If we continue the conversation about comparing platforms, then Zoom was a priority for teachers only due to the fact that it lacks extensive functionality. It was used only for video communication (video conferencing). And to transfer files, they have already used what they used in everyday life (mail, WhatsApp). It didn't take long to get used to this platform.
Teams turned out to be more complicated, it was quickly mastered by teacher-gurus, as we called them. They were not afraid to learn something new for themselves. Certainly not without my help. Even a Teams user support group was created, where everyone could ask a question that interests them.
Webinars were held on this platform, where I demonstrated my screen, clearly telling where this or that function with capabilities is located. In Teams, educators have created classes like in real life. They went into a certain room with students, where in “Publications” it was possible to conduct a dialogue with students (like in Chat) and start a lesson for the whole class there.
In "Files" it is possible to upload the materials for the lesson, or students can throw the homework done in a specific daddy. On this platform, the teacher can test students by creating and putting tests in the "Tasks", and evaluate by setting points in the "Grades". Additional Bookmarks were created with useful sites (for example, like the "MES Library") or videos from YouTube. Parent or department meetings were held. Many asked about the possibility of teaching on this platform after the end of the quarantine (this concerned additional education).
I would like to draw the following conclusion: “You should not be afraid of something new, especially if you are not left to fight it alone”. It's like a new thing (be it a new smartphone, a new washing machine, etc.), you need to get used to and not be afraid to press the buttons, learning more and more new functionality!
I hope that this article will help you choose a platform for yourself, because despite all the limitations caused by the coronavirus epidemic, it becomes obvious that there will be a transition to online education (albeit partial)!