Post pandemic, and perhaps here to stay permanently, the virtual classroom has increasingly become the building block of the educational experience. When choosing the best virtual classroom for your institute, it is essential to investigate the various features virtual classrooms offer and make your decision accordingly from the top virtual training platforms today. What you’re likely to be looking for is instructor-led virtual classroom software, that is built around live classes taught by an instructor present, and not necessarily self-paced or pre-recorded classes commonly being offered by many courses today. This raises the need for several must-have features.
For example, an important feature of your virtual classroom is security-bombings and intruders can put the safety of students at risk by exposing their names and other personal information and needs to be considered. Another important factor is the ability to collaborate and encourage student participation. In essence, your virtual classroom needs to be much more than just video conferencing with insightful and responsive features designed for students and their teachers’ needs.
Here are some of the best virtual training platforms available today.
1. Paatham
As part of a platform built for education, Paatham virtual classroom solves exactly the kind of problems learners face while attending live classes. With the app’s classroom software, students can easily collaborate, upload and access assignments, view class schedules, provide feedback in real-time, and more. In addition to content creation and video conferencing, the virtual classroom Paatham offers a digital academic bookstore, instant academic publishing platform, and security features to support learning. This ensures that students can access teacher notes, textbooks, audio lectures, and more even after class, anywhere and at any time. Paatham also facilitates collaboration, teacher-student feedback in real-time, and has features built for both K12 as well as university students, making it a one-stop app for every level from playschool to higher education and beyond.
2. EdApp
EdApp is another of the best virtual classroom software available today. It enables you to conduct live classrooms, conduct training, schedule classes, and more. It is easy to use and easily integrates with popular video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Microsoft teams.
3. Webex
Well-known and commonly-used virtual training software, Webex comes out tops for instructor-led training. With useful features such as on-screen emojis, real-time translations, meeting templates, and so on, it takes virtual classroom software beyond video conferencing.
4. Deck Toy
Many video conferencing apps have added on a few features in order to enable classroom use. With features like whiteboarding and added security, some have proven very useful during teaching. However, when an app like Deck Toy positions itself as a virtual classroom platform for very small children, it presents many possibilities for kindergarten, playschool, and primary school children, enabling gamification and other similar learning approaches.
5. Google Meet
At the beginning of the pandemic, Google meet had roughly 100 million users per day. That number has only increased in the last 18 months and continues to grow as more institutions adopt an unplanned approach to the pandemic. The virtual classroom software offers an upper limit of 250 users at a time and limited collaboration features but is cost-effective and easy to use.
6. Zoom
As a virtual training software, Zoom has become a verb of sorts, finding its place as a replacement for meet/call in common parlance. Used for business meetings as much as a virtual classroom software, Zoom was being used to conduct over 300 million meetings a day in April 2020. With a host of features such as the raised hand and more, it is a popular option for learning as much as business use.
7. New Row
A lesser-known, but effective virtual training software, New Row offers valuable features. Its most unique one is the collaborative whiteboard that all users can use simultaneously and collaborate while in the virtual classroom together, lessening the isolating effect of an online classroom.
8. Adobe Connect
Adobe Connect offers a rich experience along with service and support for using its virtual training software. Its virtual classroom features include collaborative opportunities such as whiteboards, polls, comments and drawings, and implementations as well as the ability to host up to 1000 participants.
9. Edulastic
One of the best virtual classroom platforms, Edulastic is aimed at school children and young learners. The app is differentiated by its assessment feature and enables educators to easily identify gaps and take remedial action when the issue is still small enough to fix. This leads to better results for an institution with higher student success rates.
10. Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams deserves a mention in our list of best virtual training software. An ideal tool for instructor-led training, the software lends itself to educational needs as much as business use cases. Capable of hosting up to 10,000 people per session, the software supports breakout rooms, file storage, secure access, and more.
Looking for the best virtual training software is not easy when you consider the range of choices available. However, it is important to consider that the ideal virtual classroom software has to address your specific needs. These include the location of your institute and its access to connectivity, the age of your students and their ability to use tech, your faculty and their tech-savviness as well as their style of teaching. Very importantly, your virtual classroom software has to support different kinds of content, and your students’ learning preferences.
Paatham, India’s first System for Education Design and Management, was built for education, and not the other way around. Ensuring that every feature has been designed with deep insight into the needs of educational institutes, based on the needs shared by education leaders, founders of premier institutes, and faculty. While the platform offers end-to-end solutions, institutes are invited to begin with the features they need in the immediate present and implement the other features as they go along. With support and services provided from the first demo to implementation and beyond, Paatham significantly reduces the cost of changes, drastically shortening onboarding time and visibly increasing staff productivity. Leading to a smooth experience and visibility into every instate function, as well as student progress from end to end.