Zoom keeps world in touch during pandemic lockdown

With the coronavirus disrupting our daily activities, Zoom has become one of the essential tools of communication. It has allowed us to virtually interact with co-workers, employers and employees when in-person meetings are not possible.

Chloe Pamba, a form four student at Loreto Convent Valley Road, has been using Zoom for the past three weeks, and she says it is the best video conferencing app she has come across since the partial lockdown began.

She added that it has been easy for her to use since she is a computer student and she found it easy to navigate through.

It is a video-conferencing application that you can use to virtually meet others either through video or audio or both. Within the app, there is Zoom Meeting, which is a video conferencing meeting hosted under the app.

Zoom Rooms is also another platform under the app that is a physical hardware set-up that lets companies schedule and launch Zoom meetings from their conference rooms.

Founded in 2011, it helps businesses and organisations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more work done. It is celebrated for its ease of use, high-quality HD video and audio, and collaboration facilities, such as text chat and screen sharing.

“The lessons on Zoom are very interactive with the screen sharing. For instance, when learning Math, the teacher uses the whiteboard to explain some of the calculations and formulas,” Chloe said.

It features a dynamic voice detection and choice of either full screen, gallery view or both using dual streaming for those with twice the amount of screen. It is also mobile-friendly and can be accessed through iOS and Android, allowing the user to connect from anywhere with Internet connection.

HOSTING ADVANTAGES

Zoom makes group chats easier by having group and private chat capabilities with screen sharing from tablets, phones and desktop computers. It also allows you to annotate and co-annotate shared documents as well as gain control of the keyboard, mouse and the whiteboard.

The option of starting an instant meeting or creating a scheduled meeting is one of its unique features. When one schedules a meeting, they will receive a personal meeting ID that they will share. One of the advantages of being a host in this application is that you can record a meeting or mute the participants.

Zoom allows the host to create an MP4 and M4A recording throughout a meeting and offers Google Chrome and Outlook plug-ins. The user can also enable optimisation and sound transfer for video sharing. Participants have the option of virtually raising their hands for permission to ask a question or speak to a group.

Zahabia Shamoon, a student at Loreto Convent Valley Road using Zoom during a history class, said the app is really good as she is able to interact well with the teacher since the audio quality is top-notch.  

When using the Zoom meeting format’s breakout groups, the hosts can designate times for smaller group collaboration without ending or restarting a meeting.

It ensures that security is one of the important things as it provides a host with their own private login username and password. It also implements both the Secure Socket Layer encryption and AES 256-bit encryption. Aside from this, it also features a role-based access control and admin feature controls.

Within Zoom, there are different plans a user can subscribe to. The first one is the Zoom Free, which is widely used all over the world. With this free version, the users can hold an unlimited number of meetings, but for group meetings with multiple participants, it is capped at 40 minutes.

Zoom Pro is another plan, which is considered the best option if you are using it with a small team with at least one member working remotely full-time or part-time so you can collaborate effectively.

It costs Sh1,500 per month and the tier allows the host to create personal meeting IDs for recurring Zoom meetings, to allow meeting recordings in the cloud and caps group meeting durations at 24 hours.

For the business people, there is the Zoom Business, which is suited for the small- to medium-sized businesses, with multiple teams regularly scheduling Zoom meetings. It costs Sh2,000 and this tier offers cool features for businesses to brand their meetings with Vanity URLs and company branding, dedicated customer support and transcripts of the meetings recorded in the cloud.

For businesses with more than a thousand employees, Zoom Enterprise is the suitable subscription plan. It offers you unlimited cloud storage for recordings, dedicated customer success manager and discounts on webinars and Zoom Rooms. It will cost you Sh2,000 per month.     

POPULAR IN PANDEMIC

Zoom rose to popularity when the pandemic started. The reason why it became popular is because it has a free plan. It is almost fully fledged, offering the same features as its competitors but at no cost.

It is also reliable, as people have come to like the simplistic and intuitive user interface, and they have stuck to this app because it works to their advantage.

It also has a lower latency, with the videos trying to stay under 150 milliseconds, and it is after 150 milliseconds that a conversation starts to feel unnatural.  

Paul Kinuthia, a Math teacher at Loreto Convent Valley Road, said it is a new experience and you can do so much with Zoom.

It has enabled him to communicate with the students and accommodates many of them. He converses comfortably with them since he can see what they do.

“I am able to take control of the class by allowing one student to speak at a time. It is also interactive, with students asking questions, and through screen sharing when explaining a formula,” he said.

He has used other applications, such as Skype and WhatsApp, but he confesses that Zoom is the most transforming teaching method he has come across.

He added that the limitation is there was no way to tell if the students have done the work as math and science involve a lot of marking.

Since the rise in Zoom's popularity, there have been complaints of Zoombombing, which is when an uninvited person joins a Zoom meeting. It is not necessarily a security flaw but it is how people handle public Zoom meeting links.

Careless handling of the links can result in a Zoom meeting being open to the public. It has caused problems for schools and educators as some unwanted participants posted lewd content. This forced some institutions to stop using video conferencing.

There are several ways to prevent this from happening. You can enable the waiting room, where the participants have to wait until they are admitted by the host.

Another way you can prevent your Zoom meeting from being hacked is by not using your personal meeting ID. Instead, use a per-meeting ID that is exclusive to a single meeting. Also, disable the option of the ability of others to join before the host to enable the host to be only one to admit a person to the meeting.

Once your meeting has started and everyone is in, you can lock it from outsiders and assign at least two co-hosts. The co-hosts will help control the situation in case anyone bypasses your efforts and gets into the meeting.

Edited by T Jalio