Online Teaching amid COVID-19: The Case of Zoom

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, instructors and students worldwide have been faced with the challenges of shifting from face-to-face to remote education. Due to universities short notice closure, synchronous online instruction through videoconferencing platforms has been the favoured choice for most instructors. In this paper, we report on our experience teaching an online course using Zoom videoconferencing platform. We conduct a two-fold analysis of online synchronous teaching: 1) We first compare the engagement and feedback features offered by Zoom with traditional classroom interactions. We show that some features are challenging to transpose to traditional face-to-face classroom setting while others may require additional hardware and software. 2) We analyze Zoom's attention tracker tool and evaluate the effectiveness of the attentiveness score as an effective grading metric. Our results show no apparent relationship between the students' attention as measured by Zoom and their performance. We also show that the use of recordings increases while attention decline during live classes.