Instructors who teach online or hybrid courses often face challenges in promoting student engagement. One of the most effective techniques involves using virtual office backgrounds to limit distractions, set the tone for a class and simplify the process of preparing to teach. Find out how office backgrounds for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Skype and other leading video conferencing platforms can facilitate remote learning.
Limiting Distractions In The Virtual Classroom
Students enrolled in online classes are subject to many distractions. Roommates, family members or pets can draw learners' focus away from lessons. Additional screens, such as smartphones, are also ever-present distractions. Instructors cannot account for every offscreen factor that has the potential to affect remote learning outcomes, but they can take measures to limit onscreen distractions in virtual classrooms.
Many instructors also share their homes or workplaces. Using a virtual office background can keep many of the same distractions from being on display to an entire class. While an instructor cannot shield students from every possible distraction, a professional presentation indicates the importance of course materials.
Virtual backgrounds can also preserve instructor privacy by keeping students from being able to see, and potentially become distracted by, visible features of the actual location in which an instructor is conducting a class. In addition to limiting distractions, this feature also promotes safety.
Making Virtual Learning Fun
Virtual backgrounds can help to make online courses more entertaining. For instance, an instructor of a course on foreign languages or international business might choose a premium office background with a location-based theme, such as Paris, Sicily or Tokyo, relevant to the course material. The inspiration of these global cities for virtual office designs can reinforce the subject matter of a class.
Scenes for Zoom Immersive View enable instructors to bring together students in a shared virtual classroom, which can even be set to resemble a movie theater. Participants in Immersive View see multiple simultaneous camera feeds during virtual classroom activities.
Instructors can also make arrangements to allow for breakout sessions or group work to enable students to interact and learn together. Choose from free or premium Immersive View scenes or virtual office backgrounds.
Simplifying Course Preparation
Instructors who teach online face different challenges than when conducting courses in physical classrooms. The need to establish sign-on credentials, set course meeting times, provide technical troubleshooting and communicate expectations and requirements can leave little time for staging a background.
Using virtual office backgrounds ensures that instructors always appear in professional surroundings. The ability to select a Zoom background with company logo or add a custom institutional logo can help instructors maintain a professional presentation during classes and meetings with fellow faculty members, department staff or administrators.
Instructors can select a virtual office background to use during every class meeting or change backgrounds based on courses or subject matter. The ability to choose from a wide variety of office designs with options to add an institutional logo can make upgrading to premium virtual backgrounds an effective strategy for instructors who teach online.