In the past two decades, online classroom learning has witnessed a huge upsurge. The obvious reasons being the convenience of teaching and learning from home and students finding a dedicated mentor for doubt-solving.
Thanks to the presence of various online classroom software, students could at least continue receiving lessons during last year’s Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. Even before the pandemic hit the world, according to Research and Markets forecasting, the online learning market was estimated to be worth $350 billion by 2025.
In present times, many big investors and enterprises have begun showing an interest in online tutoring programs. The scope of online classes is not just limited to school level education but also extends to higher education. Several foreign universities nowadays host online classes for long-distance learners. Similarly, numerous corporate-level certification programs are also conducted online these days with the help of online classroom apps.
Zoom & Skype have become two most popular applications of conducting online classes these days. So, let’s find out from this blog, out of Zoom & Skype, which is better as a virtual classroom software for online learning in 2021.
Comparison between Zoom & Skype features for online classroom learning
Let’s go through the below points to see which is a better contender for live classroom integration.
Lesson recording ability
Zoom offers a built-in classroom recording feature that makes it easier for students to refer back to the lessons during their self-study sessions.
However, with Skype, there isn’t any in-built recording feature available at the moment and therefore, students have to rely on third-party apps for recording lectures.
Availability of free plan
Zoom as a virtual classroom software is accessible free of cost. The basic plan of Zoom provides all essential tools to complete a session engagingly. It allows teachers to share screens.
Using Zoom’s basic plan, teachers can add up to 100 students at a time. Teachers can upgrade to a premium plan only when they wish to add more than 100 students to their virtual classroom. Whereas, with Skype’s free plan, only 50 participants can be hosted at a time.
But Zoom’s free group meeting session duration is limited to 40 minutes; however, Skype free calls support up to 4 hours.
Scalability
Zoom solves scalability issues and is thus better for larger live classroom integration. Zoom’s Business & Enterprise Plan lets teachers add up to 300 and 500 participants respectively. With an Enterprise+ Plan, these numbers can go up to 1000.
Whereas with Skype’s Business Basic Plan, a maximum of 250 participants could be added and even with higher-priced plans, the numbers can no longer be increased.
Virtual backgrounds
Teachers and students can preferably set their own virtual background during Zoom lectures that aren’t possible for Skype users.
Ease-of-use
Students and teachers can simply download the Zoom app and join their classes with a direct joining link. But Skype mandates users to create an account first and login every time, which might seem a bit cumbersome at times.
Privacy concerns
“Zoombombing,” a privacy concern has been previously reported by Zoom users. “Zoombombing” is a situation where uninvited intrusion happens during a video conference. To avoid this issue, Zoom has created a virtual waiting room feature similar to Skype to restrict uninvited users from joining a call.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, Zoom offers a direct lecture recording feature, helps to set up a virtual background, is scalable and provides an easy-to-use interface. The free plan of Zoom is better in terms of adding up to 100 students but with Skype’s basic plan, long duration of classes can be held, which isn’t possible with Zoom. Skype & Zoom, both offer virtual waiting rooms to prevent incidents of virtual intrusion.
Thus, we can see that both Zoom and Skype offer certain advantages of their own. So, it can be deduced that when it comes to online classroom learning, Zoom does offer the freedom to include more participants because it was created with the purpose of online teaching. On the other hand, Skype is better in terms of conducting longer duration of classes.