Beyond Zoom and video lectures, what do university students really need while studying online?

The modern world is forced to adapt to the new conditions caused by the spread of the pandemic. Student learning is no exception, they are forced to go online. It is worth noting that online learning has many benefits.

Zoom has become the most popular platform for online learning and video lectures. In addition, students need other tools and opportunities that are available online. In particular, students need different messengers such as Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp, and others. Online messengers provide much more opportunities for communication than text messages or phone calls. The undoubted advantage of messengers is the ability to create chats in which a group of students can be present at once, and the corresponding discussion immediately becomes a group. The ease of use of such messengers ensures the efficiency of communication.

E-mail. Through e-mail, the teacher can not only inform students about distance learning but also send written assignments and receive answers to them.

Create Google Drive, Google Docs, etc. You shouldn’t consider Google Drive functionality apart from other distance learning methods, but even the basic functionality is enough to simplify the learning process. The teacher can upload files to Google Drive and then share them with students via email. To some extent, such a service can be seen as visual dissemination of educational material among students.

Creating your own sites. The obvious advantage of creating such a site is the ability to visually publish training materials and tasks. You can publish text files, videos, pdf documents, and more on Google. This greatly simplifies the dissemination of the necessary information to an unlimited number of people, as it is enough to spread the link to the site or a specific page of the site.

Besides their own website, students should remember about useful services online. For example, if the student has an assignment to prepare an essay or research paper he can visit Studyclerk.com and find online help and good samples there. Professional writers will complete any task very quickly. The student will receive his essay or research paper, which will bring him the highest score.

Google Classroom. In this service, the teacher can create training courses, fill them with relevant materials, create tasks, and monitor the progress of their implementation. In Google Classroom, the teacher can not only download written assignments, but also determine the deadline, monitor their performance by each student, conduct online peer-review and comment, and grade. Students who are involved in Google Classroom can also see their own results and respond in a timely manner to a teacher’s comments. If the legal discipline involves the preparation and further verification of written tasks (preparation of procedural documents; justification of the legal position; written answers to tasks, etc.), then such a service greatly simplifies the organization of relevant classes.

Online audio communication (Discord, TeamSpeak, etc.). The next “level” of distance learning is to ensure live communication with students. Not all subjects require students to write written works, most of them require oral answers. This form of distance learning causes the most problems among teachers due to the complexity of its provision. In this case, online audio communication services for gamers (such as Discord or TeamSpeak) can help. These programs allow you to create voice chats and invite others to them. In this case, an analog of chat is created in Viber or Telegram, but each participant can turn on the microphone and express their position or answer questions.

Record a video lecture on a personal YouTube channel. It is the way to distribute educational material to students is the best way to publish lecture material.