With the growing popularity of online education in the months that followed March 2020, more and more people started giving expert opinions on various aspects of e-learning such as video conferencing platforms. One of the most popular questions we get is “Why don’t you use Zoom in your lessons?”
Zoom is a great video conferencing platform with immense popularity all over the world that became even more popular during the lockdown period. While Zoom is excellent for work meetings and virtual gatherings among many participants, WebEx is the platform that is generally preferred by expert online educators. The reason why is pretty simple. If your main goal is in-class interaction, WebEx offers the greatest opportunity and safety for this.
These two competitors are constantly updating to include better opportunities for interaction that WebEx has been offering for years.
Let’s have a look at some of its greatest advantages
Interactive Board. Online education is not a synonym of a telephone lesson. You can’t call yourself an online teacher if all you can do is share a screen to present the material to your student. Students need to interact with and on said material and WebEx provides this opportunity to teachers even through its free versions. In an online class, students must use the interactive board to write, circle, underline, point on, solve maths equations or even draw something. Online education is not a lecture where the teacher preaches and the student listens. It is or rather should be the most interactive type of learning you can find.
Audiovisual Material. An online teacher can also upload audios or videos on the interactive board of WebEx which are more than necessary when learning a language. Until recently WebEx was the only platform that allowed both teacher and student to access audiovisual material simultaneously and be able to interact on the board while the material was playing.
Safety & Classroom Management. Even those who prefer Zoom admit that WebEx just offers the greatest security out of all video conferencing platforms. When teaching children safety comes first. Both the safety settings that WebEx offers and also the ways the online teacher is allowed to control the virtual classroom are superior and completely necessary.
Our School chose WebEx after years of research, trial and error with various similar platforms. Despite the constant updating and improvement of the other options, WebEx remains the most suitable platform for the high level of online teaching and learning that we offer to our students.
This is thanks to its high audio and video quality, its great safety settings and potentials that it offers to an online teacher of a group class. An online teacher can co-browse through WebEx, they can share material, add and expel participants and even lock a meeting for better security.
Having said that we do promise you that our School never stops researching the video conferencing options that exist. So rest assured that we will not hesitate to reconsider our choices when a different video conferencing platform reaches the potential to give us the highest level of online learning that we want to offer you.
