What Is Zoom Not Telling You: Lessons From an Online Course During COVID-19

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 twofold analysis of online synchronous teaching. We first compare the feedback features offered by Zoom during online synchronous classes with traditional classroom interactions. We show that transposing some features to traditional face-to-face classroom setting requires additional hardware and software. We then analyze Zoom 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.