Communication Tools for Distance Learning
A guide to the communication platforms available for higher educators.
Our team’s trip to Portland for SIGCSE 2020 went awry when Oregon Governor Kate Brown banned gatherings of more than 250 people, canceling the conference the same day it began. We spent the rest of our unexpectedly short time in Portland working out of coffee shops and a WeWork. Fortunately, it’s easy to communicate with team members at your home base in New York City when your startup is building a teaching and learning tool — the features that you need for remote communication and collaboration are inherent in the technology.
Online, we saw other universities were following U. of Washington’s lead by canceling in-person classes. We began to discuss how Campuswire could help professors while they transitioned to remote instruction, ultimately deciding to offer our recently-released Pro tools at no charge for the remainder of the Spring term.
But, having worked closely with professors, we know that different people need different types of EdTech to optimize their instruction. We wanted to highlight the other excellent tools available to professors as they move their classes online. So, we used social media to crowd-source a list of recommendations made by other higher ed instructors.
Jump to:
Adobe Connect
Adobe Connect virtual classroom provides solutions for rapid training and is accessible anywhere, anytime, on virtually any device. It leverages industry-leading content authoring tools, rich learner registration capabilities, and powerful learner management and tracking tools to deliver immersive virtual classroom experiences.
Adobe Connect is a highly-customizable video conferencing tool that emphasizes the user experience — particularly by allowing hosts to style their virtual classroom by manipulating the layout of the platform’s presentation screens, called “pods”. Professors can use this feature to set up an assortment of video, lecture, and webcam pods to be easily accessed during lecture.
Other highlights of Adobe Connect include private and group chatrooms, strict privacy controls —you can enable password-protection for meetings, so there’s no Zoombombing here! — and automatic lecture recording.
While their flexible pods demonstrate that Adobe cares about Connect’s user experience, users have reported a steep learning curve in adapting to the tool. And while Adobe Connect offers a free 90-day trial to educators who are moving to distance learning, the platform is expensive (beginning at $50/month for a basic ‘Meetings’ account) when compared to other video communication platforms.
Features
- Custom Pods, Images & Layouts
- In-Depth Analytics
- Multiple Chat Pods
- Polls
- Quizzes
- Breakout Rooms
- Games
- LMS integration
Cost
Free 90-day access during COVID-19. Regularly:
- Connect Meetings: $50/month
- Connect Webinars: $130/month
- Connect Learning: $370/month
Contact
Site: https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html
Email: adobeconnectsales@adobe.com
Phone: (800) 685–3644
Campuswire
A modern forum for class Q&A, announcements, discussions, video office hours and active learning. Campuswire replaces and consolidates your discussion forum, video chat tool, and clickers — or you can pick and choose which features to use.
Campuswire is an all-in-one tool for teaching & learning. Professors looking to move their course online can set up a designated class page containing a collaborative discussion board with anonymity, participation tracking and Reddit-style answer up-voting, unlimited topic-based chatrooms, polls, live lecture-hosting with built-in student response questions, and a soon-to-be-released video conferencing tool.
Full disclosure: I work for Campuswire, so I hold some bias towards our platform. My personal bias aside, Campuswire was designed to be the most encompassing tool for both asynchronous and synchronous course-related communications on the market. The platform’s UX will be familiar to those who’ve previously used Slack or Reddit, negating the steep learning curve held by other communication tools. Built-in LaTeX and Markdown keyboards make the platform ideal for professors who teach within STEM departments, while the robust discussion board feature is suited for class-wide asynchronous discussions like those seen within humanities classes.
Campuswire’s Pro tools, including the live lecture and video conferencing features, are currently being offered at no charge for professors instructing during the Spring 2020 term. The lecture feature allows professors to upload and remotely present lectures, complete with response questions for real-time student engagement and an attendance-taking feature. Campuswire Live, launching in early April, will contain a request queue for students who wish to join the live stream and ask questions, as well as a backchannel chat for further discussion and clarification of topics.
Features
- Q+A, Notes, & Polls
- Anonymous Posting
- LaTeX & Markdown Editors
- Chatrooms
- File-Sharing
- One-Click Attendance
- Class Response Questions
- Backchannel Chat
- Video Office Hours and Lecturing
- Class Insights
Cost
- Basic: free forever.
- Pro: Free for the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester. Regularly $19.99/student per semester.
Contact
Site: https://campuswire.com
Sales Contact: Sara Abaddi, sara@campuswire.com
Discord
All-in-one voice and text chat that’s free, secure, and works on both your desktop and phone.
Discord was originally designed as a video- and voice- chatting platform for gamers. As the platform’s user base has grown, the number topic-based communities hosted on the site has exploded and professors have begun to look at the platform as a space to build class-specific communities.
Multiple text, voice, and video channels within a community’s feed allow professors to easily organize their course materials for students’ access. Discord also allows users to run the app in a browser, rather than downloading an application to their computer, which allows students who may not have strong wifi connections or who have limited space on their computers to still participate in class discussion.
While Discord offers a competitive video communication tool, they fall short of other communication platforms with regard to text-based communication. Their chat feature operates more like a chatroom than a discussion board, which may hinder class discussion.
Features
- Video, Text, and Voice Chat
- Screen Reader Data Toggle
- Custom Statuses
- Server Folders
- Stream Using ‘Go Live’
- Mobile Presence
- Colorblind Mode
- Data Privacy Controls
Cost
Free for use.
Contact
Site: https://discordapp.com/
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is LogMeIn’s alternative to Zoom, originally built for remote team collaboration and video-conferencing. The downloadable application enables professors to host wide-scale video conferences during which they can easily screen-share lecture slides. Each conference is automatically recorded and transcribed for later reference.
GoToMeeting offers an electronic ‘hand-raising’ feature students can utilize to ask questions during a video lecture, as well as private messaging capabilities for professors to contact an individual student.
Features
- Quick One-Click Meetings
- Conference Rooms
- Business Webinars
- Business Messaging
- Automatic Meeting Transcription
Cost
- Professional: $12/organizer/per month, up to 150 participants
- Business: $16/organizer/month, up to 250 participants
- Enterprise: custom pricing, contact Sales
Contact
Site: https://www.gotomeeting.com/
Sales Contact: https://www.gotomeeting.com/meeting/contact-sales
Kaltura
Our market-leading video platform, video player, and wide array of video solutions are deployed globally across thousands of enterprises, media companies, service providers, and educational institutions, leveraging video to teach, learn, communicate, collaborate, and entertain.
Kaltura offers educators the ability to build a video-based virtual classroom. Professors can choose whether to share pre-recorded videos in their video library or host a live class session, complete with screen-sharing, lecture hosting, and a virtual white-board for working through difficult equations on-screen.
Kaltura offers both a chat feature and the ability to record and send a video message to another user. It does not currently offer a discussion board nor polling. Kaltura is best suited for educators looking to improve upon their current LMS with a video-conferencing tool built specifically for education.
Features
- Video Portal
- Lecture & Whiteboard Capture
- Webinar/Townhall Meetings
- Open Platform Standards
- LMS Integration
Cost
Custom pricing, contact Sales.
Contact
Site: https://corp.kaltura.com/
Sales Contact: https://corp.kaltura.com/company/contact/
Phone: 800 871 5224
Kialo Edu
A free tool to facilitate online classroom discussions, argument mapping and used by educators world-wide to teach critical thinking.
Kialo Edu is a spin-off of Kialo, a company billed as “the world’s largest argument mapping and debate site”. Their education-focused offering is notable for its complex discussion and debate tool, which allows students to interact with course material in a more visually-driven manner than other learning platforms do. Host a class-wide discussion by stating a thesis, then have students challenge the thesis using a “pro” or “con” claim. When the entire class participates, the platform builds a ‘tree’ of supported claims and counterarguments.
While an excellent tool for class-wide discussion and debate, Kialo Edu does not offer video conferencing or lecture-hosting — however the platform does integrate with other learning management systems, which might.
Features
- Debate & Discussion Visualization
- Teacher to Student Feedback
- Student to Student Collaboration
- Assessment Grading
- LMS integration
Cost
Free for educators.
Contact
Site: https://www.kialo-edu.com/
Support: https://support.kialo-edu.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Microsoft Teams
Teams across the globe are moving to remote work. Teams allows you to chat, meet, call, and collaborate all in one place.
Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s web-conferencing tool, allows you to to stream presentations or collaborate with members of your class remotely. Lecture participants can engage in a text-based chat or ask questions via video during a remote class session. While this two-way audio and video feature allows students to speak up, it is worth noting that there is no electronic ‘hand-raising’ feature — meaning that professors cannot approve nor deny a student’s request to join the video call.
Features
- Host Online Meetings
- 1:1 Meetings
- Team Meetings
- Live Events with up to 10,000 people
- AI Assistance
- HW Audio, Video, and Screen-Sharing
- Instant Messaging
- Compatible with all Office 365 tools
Cost
- Business: $8.25 / user / month
- Business Premium: $12.50 / user / month
- Business Essentials: $5 / user / month
Contact
Site: https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software
Support: Contact Support
Phone: 855–270–0615
NEO
A learning management system that makes it easy to create and manage all learning activities, whether it’s building online classes, assessing students, enhancing collaboration, or tracking achievement.
NEO is a communication platform built specifically for academic settings. Professors can create a ‘learner portal’ for their class, then use the system’s gamification tools to build asynchronous activities out of their lecture material. The platform’s video-conferencing tool can be used to host remote lectures, and in-depth participation analytics allow educators to monitor their students’ progress.
Features
- LMS features
- Graphical class catalog
- Gamification
- Gradebook
- Automation
- Competency-Based Learning
- GAFE integration
- Customizable Portal / URL
- Ad-Hoc Reporting
- Learning paths
- SIS integration
Cost
Contact Sales.
Contact
Site: https://www.neolms.com/
Sales: https://www.neolms.com/info/contact_sales
Email: info@cypherlearning.com
Phone: 415–432–7863
Panopto
Panopto is the easiest way to record, live stream, manage, and share videos across your organization
Panopto is a video- and content-management platform. Users can also build a video library of content, à la YouTube. Bulk-upload pre-recorded lectures or supplementary materials for your students to access asynchronously.
Because Panopto is built exclusively for video content, the platform doesn’t offer a static discussion board or private messaging feature. This service is at its best when used in accordance with another class management platform.
Features
- Integrates with other Video Conferencing Systems & LMS
- Ask Questions
- Bookmark Time-Stamps
- Host Discussions within a Video Conference
- Analytics
- Quizzes
Cost
Contact Sales.
Contact
Site: https://www.panopto.com/panopto-for-education/distance-learning/
Email: sales@panopto.com
Piazza
Community-edited questions and answers. With wiki-style Q&A, when a student has a question, she doesn’t need to sift through long threads in a forum to find what she’s looking for; she can read just the single, high-quality question and answer.
Piazza is one of the most popular learning management systems on the market, due in large part to its collaborative, wiki-style question & answer feature and benefits for tight budgets (the platform is free to use). When making a post, students may choose whether to publicly or anonymously ask their classmates a question. Any student enrolled in the class can then contribute to the response by editing the section, allowing for a sense of community and collaboration between peers.
While Piazza’s discussion board is innovative, the platform does not offer the remote lecturing or video conferencing features provided by other platforms in this list. And while the platform has always been free to use, Piazza has in the past come under fire for their questionable use of student data.
Features
- Wiki-Style Editing
- LaTeX Editor, Highlighted Syntax and Code Blocking
- Questions and Posts
- Instructors-Endorsed Answers
- Anonymous Posting
- Highly Customizable Online Polls
- LMS Integration
Cost
Free for use.
Contact
Site: https://piazza.com/
Email: team@piazza.com
Phone: 800–818–4124
Poll Everywhere
Transform one-sided presentations into two-way conversations with your audience. This web-based audience response system lets you embed interactive activities directly into your presentation. The audience responds on the web or via SMS texting on their phones.
As their name suggests, Poll Everywhere is a platform used to improve student engagement by injecting live (or remote) presentations with student response questions. Poll Everywhere offers live results tracking as well as in-depth analytics of students’ performance at the end of each presentation.
It is worth noting that Poll Everywhere’s methods of participation change dramatically when moving a lecture from an in-person setting to a remote setting. While students who are physically in class can answer response questions through SMS or on the Poll Everywhere mobile app, remote lectures necessitate that students must participate in polls using the platform’s website.
Features
- Lecture Moderation
- Custom Polling
- Audience Insights
- Grading
- Team Collaboration
- Custom Keywords
Cost
- Student pays: $13.99/student/year
- Individual Instructor: $349/semester
- Department-wide: $2,500+
Contact
Site: https://www.polleverywhere.com/
Phone: (818) 338–8500
Scrible
A modern research and writing platform for school and work.
Unlike other entries of this list, Scrible does not bill itself as a communications platform. Instead, Scrible aims to provide educators with the tools they need to improve how students research and write. Professors can use Scrible to build a library of articles for students to read and reference during class. Annotate PDFs or articles that have been published online directly on the platform, then share these notes with students. The article libraries you build are key-word searchable, so students can easily return to a topic they’ve studied in the past by searching for relevant words or phrases.
As a research tool, Scrible does not offer a class-wide discussion board nor video conferencing of any kind. This platform is best used alongside another learning management system.
Features
- Bookmark Websites to Share
- Cloud File Storage
- Build an Article Library
- Text Search for Library
- Annotate Articles Online
- Comment Directly on Webpages
- Google Classroom Integration
- SSO Available
Cost
- Edu Pro Teacher: $119.99/year
Contact
Site: https://www.scrible.com/edu-educators/
Email: contact@scrible.com
Phone: (866) 727–4253
Shindig
Imagine online events that are just as interactive, productive, and memorable as real life. Shindig gives you the tools you need to stop imagining and start experiencing.
Shindig is a video conferencing platform built for large-scale events. While Adobe Connect supports up to 100 attendees, and Zoom up to 500, Shindig boasts the ability to support the video feeds of several thousand attendees concurrently. This makes Shindig is a favorite for those looking to provide remote conferences and media interviews (Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg is amongst their early adopters).
Shindig allows for one or more meeting hosts to lecture before a remote audience, then take questions from audience members. Audience questions are filtered through a question management tool, allowing presenters to prioritize which questions they’ll address during the presentation. Attendees can begin their own private video chats with groups of other participants — a feature designed to emulate the “breakout sessions” that are commonplace at conferences– allowing for networking despite the remote nature of video conferencing.
Shindig is primarily for presenting by video, so those searching for a complete teaching and learning tool will need to look elsewhere. And, while the platform’s approach to breakout sessions is innovative, professors may find these sessions to be a distraction for students who should be engaging with the lecture material rather than their peers.
Features
- Group Video Chats
- Private Video Chats
- Private Direct Messaging
- Question Management Tools
- Facebook Live Integration
- Data Collection
Cost
Contact Sales
Contact
Site: https://www.shindig.com/
Email: info@shindigevents.com
Phone: (646) 896–1747
Slack
With all of your communication and tools in one place, remote teams will stay productive no matter where you’re working from. Working in channels gives everyone on your team a shared view of progress and purpose.
Slack is a streamlined instant messaging and video conferencing platform that is found nearly ubiquitously in the workplace. Now, as universities turn to distance learning, professors have begun to explore Slack’s value as a communication tool for remote students.
As far as purely communication tools go, Slack is one of the best on the market. Professors can create public or private chat threads to explore different topics with their class, or use the platform’s video and audio calling capabilities to speak directly to students. Slack offers multi-user collaboration and project management tools, rapid file-sharing, calendar management, and team (or class) milestones.
Slack is built primarily for synchronous communication, meaning that the entire class should be online concurrently to fully make use of its instant messaging tool. If used for asynchronous discussion, students may find it difficult to sift through comments left by other students within a chat thread, as the number of responses grows too quickly to navigate with ease. This makes Slack a strong platform to supplement another lecture-hosting or discussion board-enabled tool with, but may not fulfill all of your distance learning needs by itself.
Features
- Group Video Chats
- Organized conversations Within Topic-Based Channels
- At-will Enrollment
- Conversation Threads
- Searchable Chat History
- Voice & Video Calls
Cost
Contact Sales
Contact
Site: https://slack.com/
Socrative
Quizzes, surveys, team activities, and content from educators around the world — all in one easy-to-use assessment tool.
For professors looking to brighten their course through gamification of its topics, Socrative may be the right tool to explore. Use Socrative to create highly customizable polls and quizzes for a course — types of polls available within Socrative include multiple choice, true and false, and short-answer responses. When you’ve finished building an assessment, add it to a specified class ‘Room’. Rooms are locked and can only be accessed using a short Room code provided to students by the instructor, ensuring that only the students meant to access the polls and activities can do so.
While Socrative is great for providing remote assessments and engaging students with course topics outside of the classroom, the platform does not offer a discussion board nor video chat capabilities, making it best used in addition to another tool.
Features
- Up to 20 public or private rooms
- Up to 150 Students Per Room
- Restricted Access via Student ID
- Sharable Links
- Create Quizzes, Surveys, or Mini-Competitions
Cost
Contact Sales
Contact
Site: https://socrative.com/
Zoom
Zoom helps universities and schools improve student outcomes with secure video communication services for hybrid classrooms, office hours, administrative meetings, and more.
Zoom: it’s a noun. It’s a verb. And, in our current environment, it’s a way of life. Maybe you love it, or maybe you hate it. Either way, it’s likely that you’re currently using Zoom to hold remote conferences with other members of your department’s faculty, and maybe have even begun to use Zoom for class lectures.
Zoom has become almost synonymous with life under quarantine. One of the most powerful group video-conferencing tools available, Zoom allows multiple users to engage in live meetings using their webcam and microphone devices, present using screen share, and provides a chat for side conversations or questions while within a call. The platform has been praised for its intuitive design, efficiency, and customizable backgrounds. But as Zoom’s user base has exploded, the company has come under fire for issues with its security.
“Zoombombing” — when an uninvited, un-enrolled individual disrupts a Zoom call with pornographic or violent imagery — has been an unexpected side effect of the migration to remote education. Professors, many of whom have no previous experience with online instruction, have reported that zoombombing has disrupted their lectures and left them feeling vulnerable at a time of great uncertainty. And recently, claims about Zoom’s questionable use of private user data have surfaced. The company has since vowed to investigate their data sharing practices.
Despite their security issues, Zoom has experienced an unrivaled level of growth over 2020’s first financial quarter: their user base exploded from 10 million to 200 million active users. But while they may set the bar for video and audio streaming quality, the platform lacks a discussion board or virtual classroom space that other communication companies offer — features that may be necessary for your class.
Features
- Online Meetings, Training, & Technical Support
- One-Click Content Sharing
- Real-Time Co-Annotation
- Digital White-boarding
- Video Webinars
- Conference Rooms
- Phone Systems
- Business IMs
Cost
Free for educators to use during school closures. Usually $150/month for a 20-host package.
Contact
Site: https://zoom.us/education
Sales: https://zoom.us/contactsales
Know a tool that should be on this list? Drop a comment below, or send me an email: sanna@campuswire.com.
