How coronavirus is driving improvements in online teaching

Yesterday I gave my first online class using an application developed internally at IE University, WoW Home. The result was far superior to the methodology I had been using systematically since the beginning of the pandemic. The WoW Room, which was and about which I wrote at the time, has a 45 square meter screen made up of 48 smaller monitors mounted in a U-shaped configuration covering 230 degrees, along with cameras with automatic teacher tracking and 1,600 Watt of sound, which we have been using for several years now on several courses. I have used it on numerous occasions, typically to teach students working from different locations around the world, but for other uses as well.

But under the lockdown in Spain as part of the measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic, teachers are largely unable to use any of IE University’s facilities in the Spanish capital. Instead, the little sister of our WoW Room, the so-called WoW in a Box, has taken center stage: like its physical counterpart, it uses and to create, in a browser window, a virtual classroom that allows the professor to see all his or her students in video windows in real time, along with the presentation or other materials (videos, documents, etc.) that the teacher wishes to share, as well as tools such as real-time surveys, collaborative whiteboard, chat…