Zoom is working on expanding their “meeting territory” platform to include more functions and parallel apps for business and individual use.
Coming in early 2023, Zoom Spots is a video-enabled persistent space, integrated within the Zoom platform, to help foster inclusive discussions, keep colleagues connected, and bring the fluid interactions of in-person work to distributed, hybrid teams throughout their day.
Continuous Collaboration across Zoom One: Connected workstreams across Zoom One, the all-in-one communication and collaboration offering that brings together Team Chat, Phone, Whiteboard, Meetings, and more, are enabling individuals and teams to do their best work.
Among these new capabilities is the integration between Team Chat and In-Meeting Chat, creating an always-on functionality so users can flow between Team Chat and Meetings to reduce silos, keep projects moving, and continue the conversation after meetings.
Somewhere among this “everything and the kitchen sink approach” is a model for an Online Learning Platform that could be distributed nationwide. Because at heart, it’s about information collaboration among interested parties in an efficient way.
They already have something called Zoom School, but that needs some serious upgrading to be anything like a fully Virtual School” platform. Perhaps this current ambitious platform expansion push from Zoom will spill over into Zoom School at some point, and provide a comprehensive platform for online virtual learning. Or maybe the new platform will provide a model for someone else to create a fully functional online learning “School”.
Yes, Zoom is creating this as something for “business” workers. Yet how much different might it need to be for all these tools to enable learning by creating virtual spaces? We might at some point just become comfortable calling such a virtual space a “school”.
That seems one way around status quo stasis and other blockages. Just getting to a vision with a practical model extant, can be the turning point.
Buckminister Fuller’s advice to avoid taking on the status quo head on, and instead to build the alternative, and let that route around and take over, seems apropos.
In this case, having a platform such as Zoom be repurposed for Virtual Learning would be some of using what’s available combined with routing around existing educational institutional approaches.
Zoomtopia 2022: New Innovations to Power Modern Work Experiences - Zoom Video Communications, Inc.