Why Zoom?

    1. MS Teams currently only allows 4 video streams to be visible at any one time, Zoom allows many. That means in Zoom we can all see one another, which helps hugely. It encourages 2-way communication, helps me see how the group is faring, judge when we might need a break, elicit comments and interaction etc. Without being able to see everyone, it’s more like a webinar than an interactive training course i.e. one-way communication, and so the training is less effective.

    2. Zoom has break-out rooms, and Teams doesn’t. Breakout rooms are essential to allow attendees to go off and do exercises in pairs / threes. Trying to get a group of 8 or 12 to work together on an exercise doesn’t go well in a classroom environment, let alone a virtual one.

    3. The early security concerns about ‘Zoombombing’ are easily addressed. We always use the ‘Lobby’ facility so that anyone wanting to join the Meeting has to wait to be admitted by me.

We’re keeping the relative merits of Zoom and Teams (and other platforms) under review, so we may switch apps at some point, but Zoom is our current preference for our Open Course programme for the reasons given above.

For in-house courses, we would advise using Zoom, but can use other platforms if your organisation does not find Zoom acceptable.