Zoom’s polling feature is a great way to engage students during an online class but certain aspects of Zoom’s in-built polling feature may be insufficient for power users.

Issues with the native polls on Zoom

• No instant reports: Student-wise responses are not available to the professor instantly
• No quizzes: There’s no way to convert polls to quizzes with right and wrong answers
• Difficult to create polls on-the-fly: Creating polls during the lecture requires the user to leave the Zoom interface, which can be tedious
• No collated reports for the course: Zoom does not recognize a “course”, only individual meetings. So to create a collated report of all polls in a course, one needs to download individual reports for all polls.
• No record of polls for students: Students can respond to the poll only while it’s live during the meeting. If it’s missed, the poll is gone forever.
• No option to submit late: Similar to the point above, late submissions are ruled out.
• No way to insert images and equations: Working around this constraint can be limiting for several disciplines
• No notifications: Often, activity notifications can be a great way to capture an absentee’s attention, but polls on Zoom are silent.

Create advanced class polls using Acadly with Zoom integration

Acadly is a Zoom-powered virtual classroom platform that helps instructors address ALL the issues listed above. In addition, Acadly also adds the following dimensions to your Zoom class experience:

• Automatic attendance capture: Tap a button to launch attendance and students can have themselves marked present by responding to the “attentivity check”
• Rich interactivity options: Share polls, quizzes, discussions, and live word clouds
• Post-class experience: Activities stay live after the lecture and absentees can participate at a later time too
• Automatic Zoom recording hosting: At the end of the lecture, Acadly places your meeting recording(s) on your lecture page, making it easier to organize, share, and access lecture archives
• Teaching-focused chats: Unlike the Zoom chat, Acadly’s chat supports several learning-focused features and most importantly, it stays available after the lecture too
• LMS integration (available in our enterprise version only): Poll participation data, quiz scores, and discussions statistics can be exported to LMSs like Canvas and Blackboard with Acadly’s LTI integration

How it works

About Acadly

Acadly (www.acadly.com) is a live teaching platform that helps professors make lectures interactive in both online and face-to-face classrooms.

• In online classes, our Zoom integration powers the video conferencing, and Acadly adds on-screen interactivity options like polls, quizzes, word clouds, discussions, and more
• In face-to-face classes, Acadly helps professors drive lecture engagement and automate attendance at the tap of a button