Dear Populi,
As you know the reality of COVID has significantly impacted the way many schools are teaching. We're teaching online more than we ever did before, and many of us are using Zoom, but of course, there are other video conference tools as well. Thankfully, this past spring you introduced Zoom integration. However, as other posts in the user forum indicate there is a gap in your present integration: there is no way to include a Zoom session with regular, weekly repeats. Only one-time Zoom sessions are presently part of the integration. If a professor is teaching a course asynchronously then your implementation works well. The prof will upload videos of his lectures and perhaps scheduled a few Zoom conferences throughout the semester.
But if the prof is teaching the entire semester synchronously or hybrid via Zoom then every lecture hour is a Zoom session. Entering Zoom sessions in every lesson plan, two or three times a week, is far too labor intensive and might cause already burdened profs to resent developing course material in Populi's LMS.
I don't know your plans for further development of your Zoom integration. Maybe repeated Zoom sessions are on your roadmap. That would be great! However, in the meantime there might be a solution (that at least to me) seems easier to implement.
Could you simply add one more field to the "Meeting Times" dialog (see pic and red arrow at the bottom of this message) called "Weblink" or "Virtual Classroom," or whatever the right term might be. School admin personnel would fill in the "Weblink" field with the Zoom link for the repeated session set up in Zoom's own software, or the weblink to a repeated session in whatever video conference service they use. Then Populi would make that field appear as a hyperlink on the Syllabus page for the course under the "Meetings Times" section, just like the physical Room number appears there presently. This arrangement would correspond well to the reality many profs are facing: some students will join the lecture in a building and in a certain room (the fields you already have) but some will join that same class synchronously via video conferecing. Or the entire class may be synchronously online and the "virtual classroom" is the only meeting place for the course.
For the remote students (and possibly the prof, depending on hardware configurations in the building) the flow at the beginning of class would be very natural in Populi. Click on your course, click on the "Syllabus" tab, click on the hyperlinked Zoom link under "Meetings Times." Once Zoom starts and you're in the class virtually, you click down to Lessons and find the material for that particular lecture hour.
Could this be implemented without too much work? Would it be too much to ask that this be implemented before the Fall Semester begins when many of us are facing the reality of teaching hybrid classes with some students in front of us in the room and others on a screen... all at the same time.
My sincere thanks for considering this feature request.
