When thinking brings pleasure. When thinking brings pleasure? Does thinking bring pleasure? : Why Zoom sucks for teaching and always will.

In this post I want to point out at the useless but very active discussion how to effectively use Zoom for teaching.

The answer is - you CANNOT effectively use Zoom for teaching.

Zoom, Skype, WebEx, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or any other meeting software will never be good for teaching.

Of course, to understand and accept that, one needs to know what teaching is and is about.

For may educators, including the top educators, researchers and administrators, and especially university professors, teaching is no different from animal training, from training circus animals doing tricks.

If teaching would have been simply pouring knowledge from a "knowledge storage" (a.k.a. a teacher) into an empty vessel (a.k.a a student) then Zoom would be sufficient. In fact, today Zoom is the best from all existing platforms. Naturally it means, if Zoom is bad, then other platforms are even worse. The reason for that is simply - all the platforms are not designed for teaching, or we can say, they designed not for teaching, the designed for online meetings. It "meetings" would be the same as "teaching", then the platforms would work.

But teaching is not that. Teaching is not an online meeting.

Well, teaching is not JUST an online meeting where participants talk to each other.

What is teaching?

I've got a post for that:

What is Teaching?

And anther one:

A handbook for a science teacher.

In short, at its heart, teaching is the process of helping learners to learn. And learning is indeed based on communication. If one-on-one communication would have been possible, then, again, Zoom, with some improvements on teacher's side, would be fine.

For example, as everyone else, I started from just a computer and a web camera. However, very quickly I realized, that I cannot teach PHYSICS that way. And I had to elevate my teaching studio to a new level. Two pictures below show my current equipment.

I use now two touchscreen monitors, four cameras, and lots of stuff for lecture experiments. And THAT helped A LOT to advance students' understanding of the material.

But even this setup is extremely deficient for teaching a class.

Teaching requires an effective group communication. That requires a an ability to organize, manage and monitor communication between students. That requires a completely different technological instrument.

There are many video conferencing tools, but none of them is good for teaching. Zoom is just not as bad as all other are. But even in Zoom some simple adjustments - specifically for better teaching - could be done, and yet they didn't. The guiding principle is simple - observe how a good teacher interacts with students and try to incorporate that interaction into your platform. Well, the key term is "good". For starters, a good teacher does not act like a general commanding solders telling them what to do (much more on this matter in many other posts, i.e. this one). Another example - when students work in groups, a good teacher monitors at the same time the whole class, and each individual group and can quickly switch between groups, as well as from an in-group discussion to a full-class discussion, and back. Zoom does not allow anything like that. But could, if it would modify accordingly the format of break out rooms.

A teacher needs to be able to do much more than just to see students. A teacher need to see the work of every (any!) student (and of course communicate with any student). And a teacher needs to be able to create and re-create collaborative groups and observe the group work and participate in that work. And this is just the bare minimum any teaching collaborative technology must do. Ideally, students should feel immersed in the same learning environment, and that means - use virtual reality. The need to do laboratory experiments brings even more demands to an effective distant teaching-and-leaning technology (far more advanced than primitive interactive videos, e.g. https://www.pivotinteractives.com/).

To my best knowledge, there is no company or a startup trying to develop such technology.

Hence, distant teaching sucks, and will continue to suck for years ahead. Unless someone want to change it by developing a platform specifically for teaching.

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov

My two cents in the discussion about virtual education (an excerpt from The Confession Of The Creative Brain).

I wrote a lot about education, including the distant education.

For example, check

The future of education is impossible without a robust online component.

I want you to know what I did last summer!

Getting ready for the fall semester? Here are some hints.

The difference between online learning and online teaching.