Microsoft Teams vs Zoom in online learning: a comparison side by side.

Teams vs Zoom … Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, the names of these two videoconferences and collaboration platforms will sound familiar to you.

From working remotely to exercising … remote (Zoom Parties, anyone?), These platforms have been the key to dealing with the quarantine situation. And when it comes to online learning, both tools are an excellent option to go for.

Each offers great features to improve the overall online learning experience and make things easier for teachers and students. But what are their differences? For various reasons, in the teams vs Zoom debate, we believe that Teams is best suited for online learning. Read below why we think so.

Teams vs Zoom – Start with Zoom

Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing platform that provides audio and video conferencing for up to 100 participants with HD audio and video. In the free version, meetings have a limit of 40 minutes. Paid versions can accommodate up to 1,000 participants for an unlimited period of time.

With Zoom, teachers and students have an option for sharing screens and accessing collaboration tools such as file sharing, real-time co-annotation, and digital whiteboard. There is also access to brainstorming rooms, virtual backgrounds, chat conversations during meetings, and the ability to record meetings. Zoom is available for most types of devices and supports scheduling or starting meetings from Outlook, Gmail, or iCal.

Now that we’ve mentioned zoom’s most important features, it’s time to talk about Teams.

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaboration platform that integrates document sharing, online meetings, calendars, and many other features that make business communication much easier and more effective. However, this platform is not limited to business use.

WITH MS Teams, students can connect with each other and their teachers, ask questions during a lesson, collaborate on projects, work on assignments and track their progress, use an online whiteboard, and organize files and group work. It’s exactly how we’d imagine a virtual classroom.

Students have access to the OneNote app and to teaching material folders (securing read-only content). Teachers have editor’s access to the classroom’s material folders and early access to teachers to set up the class for each lesson. This allows them to ensure that everything is ready for students to participate in the session.

Teachers can also mute students and add other permissions if necessary. They have access to Grade Sync so they can do all their review work and automatically upload from Teams to the SIS grade book.

These features make the whole process easier for students to access the resources and teachers to manage the entire process.

What is the difference between these two platforms?

When it comes to integrations, there are other factors to consider when weighing Teams versus Zoom. Microsoft Teams is integrated with Office 365. Zoom integrates seamlessly with platforms like Moodle, Canvas, Desire2Learn, Sakai and Blackboard, making this platform very useful for those who use these services.

When it comes to features, the difference between these two platforms depends on the fact that Microsoft Teams is based on team collaboration and that Zoom focuses on the quality of video conferencing.

Which one is better? We would say that Microsoft Teams is your go-to option for online learning purposes. Although videoconferencing, our main topic here, is zoom’s premise, it is just one of the features of the Microsoft Teams suite. Most features are available in the free version, making it a very useful tool for teachers in this context.

We at Instructor Brandon have made our choice between Teams vs Zoom. We use Microsoft Teams for their MS Dynamics 365 training and provide coaching sessions for students who want a personalized learning session. We also use the platform for our company’s team collaboration. “The most important thing is that the student feels comfortable with the platform used,” says founder Brandon Ahmad. “This depends on your ability to get the most out of the tool you want to use, but also to focus on the student’s experience.” In our educational environment, it is necessary to share files such as screenshots, a feature that is possible, among other things, by the MS Teams interface.

Ultimately, their main goal of all these apps is to provide a high-quality engaging experience for all types of users – to get the best out of them depends on us and how we use them.

Source: elearninginside