COVID-19 fundamentally changed education, forcing hundreds of colleges, universities, schools, training centers and tutors to move tuition to virtual settings—many, for the first time. While many institutions and public learning spaces are now reopening, hybrid forms of teaching are likely to continue for a while yet. The success of this model entirely depends on the technology chosen for the job and how educators adapt to them, but a quick Google reveals EdTech to be an incredibly crowded space. So what online teaching software should you use to make a success of virtual teaching?
What to look for in online teaching software
Your virtual teaching toolkit will largely depend on the size of your student base and organization, your particular role and subject, and any additional learning needs. Budget will also factor in, with larger institutions being able to pay for more heavy-duty learning management systems (although there are some good free versions out there).
You should also consider software performance, user-friendliness and equity to try and reduce the anxiety surrounding learning a new technology. The last point—equity—is particularly important to remember: not all your students will have access to the same bandwidth, devices or privacy. As such, you should look for ways to collaborate and learn outside of real-time video calls.
Finally, it’s important to remember that your virtual teaching toolkit shouldn’t just help you craft a great online lesson; it should support you in everything that happens outside of it. Planning and coordinating in a hybrid or remote setting can be diffcult, so look for tools that bring structure to your day and make it easy to stay connected, visible and in control.
Essential online teaching software
There are virtual teaching tools out there for every different teaching approach imaginable, catered to a range of different ages, needs and abilities. According to Studocu, the e-learning market size exceeded $315 billion in 2021 and is still growing exceptionally fast in 2023. We’ve grouped together some of the basics—with options for individuals as well as institutions. They cover everything from colleague communication and video classrooms, to managing your schedule and sticking to your work hours.
1. Zoom – for synchronous video lessons
COVID-19 has made Zoom a household name. But in addition to using Zoom to video call your family, it’s a useful tool for no-frills virtual classrooms and department meetings. Its free version far outstrips Google Hangouts and Skype in terms of participant size—allowing you to host up to 100 participants at once. It also lets you create several breakout rooms, share screens and use group chat for smaller discussions during a lesson. You can easily record calls too—useful for self-critique as you iterate your online teaching methods, and for sharing meetings with colleagues who couldn’t attend.
Price: free for 40-minute calls. Upgrade for $15/month for longer call durations.
2. Google Classroom – for a free LMS
Learning management system (LMS) software provides a single space for all your organization’s admin, documentation, reporting and training needs, in addition to the tools to plan teaching, host virtual lessons and create assignments. As a tech giant dominating the virtual collaboration space, it’s unsurprising that Google can offer a nice free platform for all the above. Google Classroom brings together all its standard G Suite tools— like Docs, Sheets and Hangouts—to help you seamlessly manage and deliver virtual teaching.
Price: free with a G Suite for Education account. Upgrade to a paid G Suite Enterprise for Education account for premium tools.
3. Microsoft Teams – for a connected digital learning hub
While stopping short of calling itself an LMS, Microsoft Teams offers a similar suite of virtual teaching tools as Google Classroom and is also happily free. It allows conversations, content and collaboration to happen in one unified digital space. Great for creating secure virtual classrooms, sharing assignments and feedback, and streamlining staff communication.
Price: free for students and teachers with a valid school email address.
4. Blackboard – for top-of-the-range higher education LMS
Time to get serious—if you’re looking for a purpose-built higher education LMS with a modern and intuitive feel, check out Blackboard. It facilitates fluid, user-friendly digital learning environments with a ton of specialist solutions thrown in. These range from Blackboard Analytics for Learn, which helps you identify barriers to student success, to Blackboard Predict and Blackboard Intelligence which help keep students on track and let you optimize institutional performance. The team at StuDocu swear by it, finding it to be a great platform for delivering sophisticated, engaging online teaching experiences and ensuring everyone gets the right support.
Price: aimed at institutions rather than individuals, Blackboard comes with a hefty license fee.
5. Slack – for peer and organization communication
Transparent asynchronous is the bedrock of all remote collaboration – it democratizes communication, allowing everyone to access department-wide conversations and talk when it actually suits their schedule. Many remote teams have already realized that email just isn’t the optimal space for that, and are instead using instant messaging platforms like Slack for the bulk of their day-to-day communication. Slack effectively breaks all team communication into thematic groups – called threads – allowing staff to dip in and out of conversations that concern them. It’s a great tool for building an online peer community – creating spaces for colleagues to share best practices, exchange ideas, share global updates and just check-in on each other.
Price: $7/month per person for their smallest plan.
6. Floop – for work questions and support
For students, Floop is the virtual equivalent of raising your hand in class. It was built by teachers to solve the challenge of providing tailored support and feedback to individual students learning remotely. Students can quickly send pictures of their work with anchored comments, so they can highlight exactly where they are stuck and raise questions. Teachers just need to reply to the comment to provide targeted feedback. A handy tool if you’re working with analogue or read-only digital materials – although you might want to prioritize using collaborative document platforms like Dropbox Paper longer-term.
Price: free for now, but pricing will be announced for the 2020-21 school year.
7. SmartSurvey – for feedback on remote teaching
Feedback is crucial for making distanced learning work – especially in the early days as you adapt your approach to an online setting. If you go in for one of the heavy-duty learning management systems detailed above, you’ll likely have a few options for posing questions and reviewing engagement data. But if you don’t, simple online survey platforms like SmartSurvey are a good alternative. Use it with students to see how well you explained certain concepts, as well as with teaching staff to surface admin blind spots and gauge wellbeing.
Price: free for sending a maximum of 15 questions to 100 people.
8. Edmondo – for centralized teacher-student communication
Primarily targeted at school teachers, Edmondo helps you centralize all tutor-student and tutor-parent communications. It’s effectively a social platform – with familiar post and direct messaging functionality – for classroom discussion and organization. You can use it to share assignments and materials, help students learn new virtual tools, post classroom updates or chat directly with individuals. A useful asynchronous teaching tool for students who may not always have access to a home computer or a strong Wi-Fi connection.
Price: completely free, with a paid “Schools” plan for larger organizations.
9. Todoist – For organizing your tasks
If you’re looking for a digital to-do list that’s a cut above Notes, check out Todoist. Aside from mapping out all your work in one organized space, it helps you prioritize tasks and keep your most important upcoming tasks in focus. With integrations for a ton of staple digital collaboration tools – including Dropbox and Google Calendar – it acts as an organizational hub for getting things done.
Price: free for 5 people working on up to 80 projects. Upgrade for $3/month for their Premium plan.
10. Pocket - for curating useful web resources
Ditch your bloated bookmarks bar for this handy app, which lets you save web content to one clean repository. It’s provides an easy way to save all the interesting articles you encounter for later, and also lets you create shared resource lists for colleagues and students.
Price: free, with the option to upgrade for $5/month for Premium.
11. Loom – for making quick video explainers and demos
Billed as “video messaging for work”, Loom is a great tool for creating quick screencast videos – either with or without audio. It’s ideal for providing tutorials and demos, like showing a group of people how to set up or use a new piece of software. Just start recording your screen and get a shareable link to your video once you’ve stopped.
Price: the basic version is completely free. Upgrade for $5/month for advanced recording and editing features.
12. Prezi – for professional digital presentations
Prezi lends instant design credibility to department and classroom presentations. It offers motion, zoom and spatial relationships for those with the budget looking for something more engaging than PowerPoint, Keynote or Slides. A range of professionally-designed templates do the artistic legwork for you, so you only have to focus on adding your content.
Price: subscriptions start at $9/month. Upgrade for $24/month for offline access, PDF export and premium images.
13. Dropbox Paper – for document collaboration
If you need a remote-friendly word processor tool, look no further. Dropbox Paper provides one clean space for creating, sharing and editing work with others in real-time. It’s a particularly good choice for student assessment, allowing you to add comments throughout a document. You don’t need a Dropbox subscription to use it either – for now, at least, it’s completely free. Its Slack integration is a nice bonus if you’re looking to keep your communications neatly tied together.
Price: completely free.
14. WeTransfer – for sharing large files
Need to send someone a file that’s too big for an email attachment with secure file sharing? Provided it’s smaller than 2 GB, you can send it via this free browser tool. If you’d rather build a common file repository for staff or students, check out Dropbox (or Google Drive File Stream for a less user-friendly, but free solution). Shared folders let everyone quickly share and access important documents, templates, frameworks and assets.
Price: free for sending files up to 2 GB. Upgrade for $12/month to send up to 20 GB and enjoy 1 TB of storage.
15. Idroo – for virtual whiteboards and live annotation
Virtual whiteboards are a no-brainer if you teach using equations or diagrams, but they also help to make all types of virtual collaboration easier and more dynamic. In addition to plain boards, Idroo lets you paste powerpoint presentations, PDFs and Word documents for live annotation. You just need to set up a web account to get started.
Price: get 5 plain boards and 50MB of storage for free. Upgrade for $10/month if you need document annotation.
16. Markup Hero – for quick image annotation
While mainly aimed at creative industries, Markup Hero is a useful for taking screenshots and annotating images. You can easily to share links to your images and save annotations for future editing. Being completely free, it’s an ideal choice for providing feedback on assignments, presentations or offline documents.
Price: completely free
