As the schools around the world are shifting towards a remote classroom in response to COVID-19, a need to find the right platform to enable proper remote classrooms became more imminent. There are several key players in remote learning, and this article will briefly introduce some of them based on their appropriate use case scenarios.

Band — Social platform for community building

Band is a platform specialized in community building. It provides an easy process to form an online community based on similar preferences. Members can facilitate online communication within members, and create an offline meeting to form bonds.

Band provides numerous features to make a post interactive, including photo, sticker, video, polls, and more.

While it also provides video conference feature that makes a viable platform to be used for remote learning, Band was originally set out as a casual and social community-building platform. It almost feels like using a social network platform like Facebook when looking at Band’s newsfeed page.

Zoom— Versatile video conferencing tool

Zoom is a video conferencing platform praised in the business sector for its high-quality video and audio. Due to the recent outbreak of COVID-19, many educational institutions have adopted Zoom for its online live lecturing.

While the service itself is great, Zoom mainly has its forte on video conferencing. It does provide chat and file sharing features, but they are pretty minimal, in light of a more superior form of communication (online face to face).

Zoom still lacks school-specific design elements. So when it comes to remote teaching, it is only a supplementary tool for online live lecturing, rather than a primary tool for classroom managing.

Piazza — Well-established tool for school, not for remote lecturing

Piazza has been around for nearly 20 years, used by numerous schools around the world. It provides wiki-style UI that facilitates communication among students, and between students and professors. Equipped with code blocks and LaTeX editor, Piazza is an especially useful tool for computer science or programming classes.

Many of its features are geared towards school settings, however, mostly for following up on offline lectures. It lacks video conferencing integration that makes it difficult for realtime remote-lecturing, making it a limited tool to be used especially in times like now when schools are being shut down nationwide.

CLASSUM — All in one tool for both on/offline teaching

CLASSUM is an ed-tech platform that is being used by hundreds of universities and educational institutions around the world. It offers a user interface that remodels all necessary elements of a classroom.

Here is how it works: First, a classroom is created on CLASSUM that includes role setting, (professor, student) and category setting (homework, mid-term, final, etc). Once the class is created, all participants can engage in a collaborative Q&A using a chat-room style user-interface.

Every post is enabled with code block and LaTeX so that students do not need to write code on a separate tool. Every member activity and engagement is tracked and recorded, so educators can go into more personal level student care if they want to.

Most importantly, while providing all these features, CLASSUM also offers video uploading and video conferencing features (integrated with Zoom) to enable classes to be held anytime anywhere.

So which tool should educators use?

There are still many tools out there that have not been covered in this post. Regardlessly, when looking for the right tool for educators, just consider the following;

1. Looking for a platform to foster interest and to hold public sessions? → Band should suffice
2. Looking for a great video conferencing platform to convert your lecture online? → Zoom is great, but probably need a secondary tool for class management.
3. Looking for a tool to facilitate questions and answers, and to easily conduct discussion involving programming code? → CLASSUM and Piazza both works
4. Looking for a tool that can be used for on/offline lectures with fully functional video uploading and video conferencing capabilities? → CLASSUM is the way to go.

CLASSUM is a communication tool for education used by institutions around the world, including Samsung, Hyundai, LG CNS, Shiseido, and KAIST.

Learn more about CLASSUM 👉 www.classum.com

Any questions? 👉 Ask us!