In my online classes, I’ve used Blackboard Collaborate as well as Meetings/BigBlueButton in Sakai. The latter is billed as a “webinar” tool. (“Oh boy, I’ve been invited to participate in a webinar! I can’t wait!” said no one ever.) As is so often the case, the usability of these is severely hindered by how complicated & glitchy they are. In the case of Sakai, the “easy” instructions explaining to students how to join a session run four full pages, with lots of illustrations. Collaborate, meanwhile, is exactly what one expects from Bb: cumbersome and with that trademark Bb patched-together quality. Based on my experience (which includes numerous outings, both organized by me and by others who presumably know more than me about it), putting together a group session typically goes like this: You have 50 minutes for the session. It takes everyone 30 minutes to get themselves online, aside from the ones that give up. This leaves 20 minutes to accomplish whatever you had planned, with a bunch of people in various stages of annoyance. I suppose if you do this kind of activity regularly, this 20:30 ratio will eventually improve. On the other hand, half the times I’m at a meeting that involves powerpoint and a projector, it takes 10 minutes or more to sort it out, and these are basic technologies that have been around for 30+ years.

In short, if you want to incorporate group synchronous meetings in your online classes, start practicing now. There’s a reason why in the several courses I’ve taken via the Illinois Online Network on the subject of online teaching, only one has included an attempt at some kind of synchronous group meeting, and that was a one-off case that basically involved demonstrating that such things exist. It was a mixed success at best.

So… what are the options if you leave your LMS behind? For group video conferencing, a popular option is Zoom, “the original software-based conference room solution.” A drawback is that the free version imposes a 40-minute limit on group meetings.

For one-on-one and small-group conferencing, other options exist. My students have preferred to use Skype — it’s familiar and pretty easy to use.

In much of the world, the standard tool for both personal and professional communication is WhatsApp, “a freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) service owned by Facebook” which is both synchronous and asynchronous, offering chat, voice calls, and video calls between individuals and groups. It’s also possible to send attachments, and chat records are automatically saved and searchable. It uses end-to-end encryption. Any 6-year-old can figure out how to use it in 30 seconds. And it’s very easy to create groups; everyone I know in Latin America has half a dozen active groups going at all times (family, immediate family, work, people in my group in the class, etc.). Group videos can be held with up to 4 participants. The OS and Android apps are solid and web integration is simple (open the webpage & point your camera at the QR code).

For my money, nothing comes close to WhatsApp for synchronous/asynchronous connections that don’t require voice/video for larger groups. (Facebook’s other chat/VoIP platform, Messenger, supports voice conferencing for very large groups, btw.)