A world beyond PowerPoint

Since last week's class, I've been thinking a lot about technology in the classroom.

When I started teaching in 2002, the college's learning management system of choice was a clunky old beast called WebCT. It was like a digital salad bar - you could pick and choose the elements you wanted, and arrange them in different combinations, but your choices were limited to what was on offer. You could embellish a little bit - the equivalent of putting dressing on your salad, I suppose - which might serve to make it all seem at least momentarily more interesting.

My classroom still had an overhead projector on a dolly, and I never used it. Not once. I was embarrassed, frankly, at how arcane it was. Eventually, the manual overhead projector was replaced with a digital one, connected to the in-house audio-visual system and capable of displaying images on the big screen in the room. This proves the adage, I think, that every new technology starts by imitating its predecessor. If you watch very early tv programs (from the 1950s, for example), you can see that they were basically radio plays shot like stage shows.

After several years, the college transitioned from WebCT to Blackboard. It was better; more flexible, much more user-friendly; and over time features were added to make the overall experience better. I eventually became more comfortable with the options at my disposal and worked to take advantage of them for my students' benefit. Although the technology had improved, the physical layout of the room had barely changed. There was still, for example, no video conferencing capability. If I wanted to invite a guest to make a virtual visit, I would have to jerry-rig something that might or might not work.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, and I was forced to work from home like so many people, I suddenly discovered a versatility that hadn't been there before. As much as I missed, and continue to miss, the contact and energy of face-to-face encounters with my students, being online opened up a wealth of new possibilities in terms of how I could deliver my classes.

I could switch effortlessly (my halting digital skills aside) from a slide presentation to a YouTube video to an interactive poll with no disruption. Zoom gave me the option of bringing in virtual guests and giving my students access to people who never would have been able to attend in person. I even reduced my reliance on PowerPoint - the venerable Microsoft presentation software - in favour of Google Slides, which seemed much more interesting.

As an aside, the story of Zoom's meteoric rise to prominence and its central place in our consciousness is interesting. It was first introduced to the marketplace in 2011, the same year that tech giant Microsoft bought Skype. Through a series of miscalculations and possibly bad business decisions, Skype ceded its market dominance to Zoom in the space of just a very few years. Today, Zoom commands 50% or more of the worldwide video conferencing market; Microsoft is far behind. Even in education, Zoom has an almost 2-to-1 advantage over its nearest competitor.

Zoom's growth has been staggering, especially in the last 12-15 months. The number of meeting minutes it logged jumped by 65% between June and September 2020. Higher education is feeling the effect of this shift as acutely as any other sector, if not more so. A 2017 report found that approximately 6,900 US post-secondary institutions were already using Zoom. Today it's part of the learning experience in some 100,000 schools worldwide.

Over the years, I've used almost every learning management system there is. None is perfect; all have advantages and disadvantages. If I had to wager, I'd put better than even money on one or more of these video conferencing apps supplanting (or at least buying up) the major learning management systems in the years ahead.