Zoom is failing teachers. Here’s how they would redesign it
Millions of students are learning through Zoom this fall. So why
does it still feel like a corporate meeting app that has been MacGyvered into
an education platform?
BY SUZANNE
LABARRE8
MINUTE READ
This story is part
of Fast Company’s Reinventing
Education package. As millions of students begin school during a deadly
pandemic and global recession, we’re highlighting the ongoing efforts to keep
children safe in the classroom, educate them remotely, and help their parents
manage a new second shift. Click here to read the whole series.
Last spring, when
shelter-in-place orders went into effect, my daughter’s preschool teacher
heroically tried to adapt her classroom to the virtual world. At first, she had
an assistant, whose primary job was to mute and unmute kids in Zoom to imitate
the experience of calling on students in class. The task is harder than it
seems: You have to scan a Brady Bunch-style grid of two dozen wiggling children
for raised hands, click “unmute” under one of their names, and cross your
fingers that they are not muted on their end (half the time, they are).
After a few months, the
assistant was furloughed, leaving my daughter’s teacher to manage the mute
function on her own—while also trying to present lessons, keep track of time,
and babysit a group of increasingly stir-crazy 3- to 5-year-olds. She was
juggling too many competing demands. She might as well have been asked to play
Rachmaninoff while riding a unicycle.
Countless teachers
are facing similar problems this fall, as districts across the
country usher in the
school year remotely to help curb the spread of COVID-19. Conventional wisdom
has it that remote learning is an inferior substitute for in-person classes,
useful only in an emergency that threatens the health and safety of teachers,
students, and staff. And it’s true that the circumstances around distance
learning pose tremendous challenges, exacerbating inequity and placing impossible demands on
working parents. But class via computers
itself is not inherently
flawed. It’s the remote
platforms that are failing teachers and students.
Zoom, in particular, has
struggled to adjust to its newfound prominence in the educational firmament.
More than 100,000 U.S. school districts and roughly half the country’s
higher-education institutions use the videoconferencing platform in large part
because it’s easy, at least in theory: Just click a link, and start teaching.
In practice, the experience is more complicated. Last month, Zoom went down for
hours due to an unspecified problem, disrupting the first day of school for many
children and college students. Last spring, the platform experienced several
high-profile hacking incidents, which caused New York City schools and other
districts to temporarily ban Zoom.
The company
quickly rolled out a series of
security upgrades. But it has been slower
to address workaday complaints about its UX. Classes were already underway at
school districts across the country on August 20 when Zoom finally
released improvements critical to educators, such as a way of
including ASL interpreters and more control over muting. Many other important
features remain unavailable. So we asked teachers—ranging from elementary
school teachers to college professors—how they would redesign Zoom to work
better for themselves and their students.
A MUTE FUNCTION EVEN 6-YEAR-OLDS CAN
UNDERSTAND
Muting is a key
classroom tool online, allowing teachers to both minimize disruptions and
encourage participation. But as I witnessed last spring, young children often
don’t know how to use their microphones, and not all students have a parent
sitting there to help them. It doesn’t help matters that the “mute” button is
small and right next to the “start video/stop video” button—a poor design
choice for little hands with limited dexterity. “It’s pretty constant for me
working with 6-year-olds to have to tell them to mute or unmute themselves,”
says Danielle LaBarre, a first-grade teacher at Ruby Bridges Elementary School
in Alameda, California (full disclosure: She’s my sister-in-law).
In August, Zoom updated
its platform to let teachers selectively unmute students. But the feature is
buried in Zoom’s web portal settings. And once teachers activate it, students
or their parents have to opt in through a pop-up message. This is to address
potential privacy concerns (fortunately, they only have to opt in once). Of
course, if they don’t, the teacher is right back where she started, wasting
precious class time reminding students to unmute themselves.
Alternatively, LaBarre
suggests that Zoom could create a strong visual cue that helps even the
youngest learners navigate the mute function. For now, LaBarre says she’s
planning to make one herself. “When I start Zooming with my new class, I’ll
show a picture of what the microphone looks like when it’s on, and then I’ll
have another picture of what the microphone looks like when it’s muted,” she
says. “That way, I won’t have to say ‘turn your mic on.'”
BETTER BREAKOUT ROOMS
One of the biggest
complaints among teachers I spoke with was the difficulty of replicating
small-group learning in Zoom. You can divide students up into breakout rooms,
but there’s no way for a teacher to observe every group and give feedback all
at once, making it tough to know whether students are staying on track.
“I might pose a big
question about the perspective of character in a story and have students draw a
connection to their own lives in a pair share,” says John Cherichello, a
7th-grade English Language Arts teacher at MS 88 in Brooklyn, referring to an
in-person teaching technique in which students partner up to discuss a topic
one-on-one. On Zoom, he has to drop into each breakout room to pose the same
question over and over again, which is a huge time suck. A better design would
give Cherichello an overview of all the breakout rooms and allow him to chime
in, like an omniscient narrator, at opportune moments. “An easy breakout room
function would really help make the virtual classroom feel a little bit more
like the real thing,” he says.
A MORE ROBUST CHAT
Zoom’s chat feature is
another major pain point for many teachers. “One of the things I hate the most
about Zoom is the chat,” says Brandon Ward, who teaches user experience design
to continuing education learners at Southern Methodist University. “It’s
really, really difficult to follow.”
Indeed, the chatbox,
which appears to the side of Zoom’s main view, is frills-free to the point of
wringing any nuance from conversations. You can’t have side conversations
(using threads, for instance), without inundating the main chat. There are no
emoji readily available. To find an emoji, you have to click “edit” in the nav
bar, then “emojis & symbols,” and an emoji menu appears—a cumbersome
process that defeats the purpose of using emoji as shorthand for written words.
Ward’s suggestion?
Establish a stronger information hierarchy. “I would design it for moderators,
so they can see a blown-out version of the chat,” he says. “Then I would create
tools for distinguishing between comments, questions, and DMs, and make it more
obvious when people are raising hands or clapping. Some of my meetups have
close to 500 people. The chats become a constant stream. It’s overwhelming.”
A RICHER WAY OF PRESENTING LESSONS
Jamie Ewing, a science
teacher for grades K through 5th at PS 277 in the Bronx, laments how Zoom
“flattens” his teaching style. “When I’m in front of the classroom, I get to
interact with the content,” he says. “In a Zoom meeting, you don’t have that
option. Either you’re the focus or the content is the focus. When you switch
over to screen share, you disappear, and you lose the ability to make eye
contact [with students].”
Elise McHugh, a biology
and chemistry teacher at Groton-Dunstable Regional High School in Groton,
Massachusetts, echoes the sentiment. “I found myself holding up my paper copy
of the periodic table, and then another paper copy of another reference sheet,
and then moving the computer to face my physical white board when solving a
chemistry problem” last spring, she says. “It would be easier if I could toggle
between these documents quickly through Zoom, and even be able to have a cursor
on them.”
Ewing has instead
started testing a third-party app called Prezi Video,
which enables him to overlay graphics onto Zoom lectures to liven up his
lessons. In one example, images of a baseball game pop up behind him to
illustrate a lesson on math angles. “Adding an extra layer makes it more
inviting and more emotionally engaging,” he says.
Would he rather be able
to create media-rich presentations directly in Zoom? Sure, he says, but “at
this point, I’ll take what I can get.”
AN ENTIRELY NEW PRODUCT FOR EDUCATORS
McHugh was one of
several teachers I spoke with who called for Zoom to spin off an app
exclusively designed for educators. “I would recommend [Zoom] make a separate
program, much like Google did [with Google Classroom], with features specific
to the needs of teachers and students,” she says. “This is a niche market that
Zoom could find a place in this coming school year.”
Zoom, for its part, says
it has no plans to release such a product. “We’re focusing on our training,”
says Zoom’s Global Education Lead Anne Keehn. The company recently held a
virtual training summit for 40,000 educators from 150 countries and plans to
continue its focus on educating teachers about the features Zoom has, not on
developing new software from scratch. “We don’t see a need for a separate
product,” she says.
Indeed, Zoom’s latest
round of updates is geared toward teachers: Teachers can now create virtual
seating charts and spotlight a group of students to approximate an in-person
class presentation. There’s also a “professional music mode,” an audio feature
explicitly designed to help music teachers improve the quality of their
lessons. Keehn suggests more education-specific tweaks are on the way.
But these are largely
iterative changes, and Zoom could be ceding its sizable competitive advantage
if it doesn’t fully embrace its starring role in U.S. education—especially
since aspects of distance learning will likely stick around long after COVID-19
abates.
“What it really comes
down to is: Does Zoom want to continue as a meeting service that’s doing
emergency remote learning?” says Shanna Katz Kattari, an assistant professor of
social work and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. “[Distance
learning] is going to continue for at least another year, if not longer. People
are going to recognize that online learning is completely valid and effective.
It would be a really wise investment to make a secondary product for classrooms.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Suzanne LaBarre is the editor of Co.Design.
Previously, she was the online content director of Popular Science and has
written for the New York Times, the New York Observer, Newsday, I.D
