Five Ideas to Design a Better Zoom Experience

Like many people, my life has been dominated by Zoom calls since mid-March. And as a Professor, I’ve had the added challenge of reimagining my classroom in a digital environment.

I made it through the Spring. I think the class turned out well, and I’m thankful to have taught such an amazing group of students that were nimble, kind, and resilient.

But now that I’ve had a breather since the end of the semester, I’ve had some time to think and reflect. And it looks like some version of class on Zoom will be a regular part of our future as teachers. So…

Hey Zoom, I’d love your help designing a better learning experience for my students.

Being a teacher is more than just speaking at students and giving them new nuggets of knowledge. Libraries and YouTube exist. These students don’t need me to give them information and facts. The classroom is more than that. It’s about the interaction, the social engagement, and the collision of what you know and what you are learning in real-time. As a teacher, I use the small social, physical, and audible cues of the students to let me know when to add more, when to move on, when to take a break, and when to tell a story about “One time in the Peace Corps…”

I know that we can’t recreate the physical classroom on Zoom, and I’m not advocating for that. I want to design new experiences that can only happen because we are in a digital space. But there are best practices in teaching that are getting lost right now.

Let’s bring back the human connections in the classroom and leverage the possibilities of a digital learning environment.

I’ve got Five Ideas to design a better Zoom for teachers. I’ve organized them by 5 key phases of a class. Pre-Launch, Welcome, Main Room, Breakout Room, and Sign-off

1. Pre-Launch: A Practice Classroom

Teaching is an experience that requires preparation, game-planning, contingency planning, a bit of theatrics, and a lot of practice. Right now there is not a way to log into my Zoom classroom and practice. I don’t like having to teach my class for the first time in real-time with so many variables out of my control because of the digital classroom environment.

Here are the key features of the Training Classroom:

• All features enabled and able to be saved (imagine getting to set up your physical classroom).
• The Training room can be filled with a certain number of “digital/fake” students (5–500) so we can experience what it might be like to swipe through 10 screens of faces if we need to.
• Can practice with breakout rooms, messaging, sharing screens, etc.
• Let the “digital” Students do stuff. Have them type Lorem Ipsum in Chat or raise their hand, or drop out and come back. Teaching in Zoom is full of activity that we have to get use to responding to.

2. Launch and Welcome

Launching a class on Zoom is a bit clunky. Once the room is launched everyone logs in at different times, we say hello, and then wait in silence until someone else logs in and start the process over again. I do my best to fill it with conversation. But in my physical classroom, I play music, give directions, and let the soft start to a class be more casual.

Here are the key feature of the class Launch and Welcome:

• A Banner or something that provides a welcome note and some basic directions, “Remember to submit your homework on Canvas, and open your book to page 99.”
• Music! The silence is so strange. Currently, a version of this exists that allows me to share audio, but it requires the music in a different interface. I’d love to have a plug-in to Spotify that lets me play/pause some music. Maybe even pick a song for the waiting room so folks know they are being included.
• Bonus thought… let a co-host truly be a Host and have all the same powers. As a teacher there are many things to manage, especially if you are hosting, presenting, watching the time, and hoping for some transformational learning along the way.

3. Main Room

The Main Room is the closest approximation to a classroom. But it lacks some basic foundations that help with teaching: student autonomy, and also teacher control. Students like to pick where they sit in a classroom, and that also builds consistency and a shared foundation. “Everyone in the back row, stand up!” But in Zoom, the order of people is totally random.

Here are the key features for the Main Room:

• Defining the order of participants. Some options might be Alphabetical, Fixed/Assigned, Student Choice, Random, and also whatever the current order system is… Is it based on who speaks?
• Ability to move participants around like tiles on a webpage. This drag-and-drop ordering would be great for the teacher. This will allow us to facilitate conversations (“… discuss with the neighbor to your right.”), games and warmups (“…play rock paper scissor with the person below you.”), and more ( “…everyone count off and odd numbers present first”)
• A true co-host with all the same abilities to allow us to Co-Instruct or even have 4–5 Hosts for large classes and events.

Here are some great examples of things that I would love to do with a fixed order. Dartmouth Professor Eugene Korsunskiy created this list of warmups for Zoom.

4. Breakout Rooms

This feature is so great. This is why Zoom is amazing, and why I’ll be coming back to it this Fall (also they’ve locked in a deal with UT Austin). The ability to have small group discussion, and focused conversation is great. But as a teacher it’s a black box. I lose all insight to what is happening globally in my classroom. I can’t see or hear anything without individually logging into each Breakout Room.

Here are the new features for Breakout Room:

• Teacher’s view still allows for gallery view of all participants and shows how they are grouped into Breakout Rooms, and gives insight to what’s going on.
• Able to click into a room and listen in (with full awareness of the students)
• Still able to fully join a breakout room and be face to face with students.
• A Global Timer for the Main Room and the Breakout Rooms.
• Ability to share links and two-way chat with any breakout room.

5. Wrap-up and Goodbye

Ritual is an important part of any class experience. We welcome students, we have a shared learning experience, and we wrap-up our learning and move on. I want the parting moment to be something special, and a way to close the learning experience until the next time. This transition is an important time for cementing their learning, integrating new knowledge, and preparing to head to the next part of their day.

Key features for the Wrap-up and Goodbye:

• A sign-off button that has variable option like setting a time to log off so you’re not late to next meeting.
• Sign-off Messages that allow participants to share a parting message in their video window, “Thanks! So Fun! See you on Wednesday!”
• Wipes and Fades… Let’s make it fun! These are cheesy but playful, and maybe participants could add their own the same way they can chose a virtual background.

I know there are many many more things that folks would like to have included. Let me know and I’d be happy to sketch and collaborate on more.

And if you work for Zoom… I’d be happy to set up a Zoom call to chat more.