Zoom announces education features, responding to teacher, administrator requests

KUALA LUMPUR, April 12 (Bernama) -- Zoom Video Communications Inc has declared at the CoSN2022 national conference, new features for education in response to requests from teachers and administrators.

These features span Zoom’s Chat and Meetings offerings and are designed to support teachers who need to engage and manage students joining class remotely or submitting homework assignments.

“Delivering happiness to our customers is the core of what we do at Zoom,” said Johann Zimmern, Global Education Strategy Lead, Zoom in a statement.

“We work closely with our global K-12 and higher education customers, taking their requests into account and involving them in feature development. As a direct result of this, Zoom developed these exciting new features for education.”

Chromebooks are a popular choice for students and teachers. Virtual background and blur are now available for Zoom for Chrome Progressive Web Application (PWA) users. Zoom developed this capability after requests from various education customers.

Breakout Rooms, a popular education feature, also received enhancements in this latest release. Program Audio allows meeting hosts to share content with audio to Breakout Rooms, adding the ability to share videos with audio. With the LTI Pro integration enhancement, educators can populate Breakout Rooms from the course roster.

Other new features include sending audio and video messages into Zoom Chat, and the ability to rename participants in the Waiting Room. Asynchronous video allows users the time to consider their responses and then record as needed to provide thoughtfully crafted responses. Users can click ‘video’ at the bottom of the chat client and record up to a three-minute video message that goes directly into the out-of-meeting chat channel.

Anywhere Polls will allow polling content to live in a central repository that can be accessed from any meeting on an account, instead of being associated with a particular meeting. This will make it easier for instructors to reuse polls and will also be beneficial for grading. This feature will be available soon.

-- BERNAMA