Zoom with Confidence and Breakout with Assurance

Despite it being used to hold different types of meetings, Zoom was actually designed with the educator in mind (Li et. al. 2021). From the very beginning Zoom meetings were valued differently by different educators. Some educators could not help but notice how these meetings were lacking the paralinguistic cues and nonverbal communication that is key in teaching a face-to-face class (Guillén et. al., 2020). In her article titled Why We’re Exhausted by Zoom, Susan Blum says; “Over my decades of teaching, I’ve learned to read a room pretty well: the harmonized posture, the breaths, the laughter, the eye gaze. My classes are successful when everyone is so excited that they want to speak over each other out of sheer exuberance (…). Technological platforms such as Zoom provide some imitations of face‐to‐face interaction, what I notice the most is that I miss the three‐dimensional faces and the bodies and the eyes and the breaths” (Blum, 2020). The lack of paralinguistic cues could be the reason behind students’ reluctance to self-nominate themselves to respond to questions or provide opinions during a class meeting held on Zoom (Kohnke et. al., 2020).

Read the whole article here (pages 12 to 15)