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According to government data documented by the South China Morning Post, the first human case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, was discovered on November 17, 2019 at the Huana Seafood Wholesale Market in China (Li et al., 2020). Since then, COVID-19 has spread all over the world, becoming a global pandemic. On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a Global Public Health Emergency. According to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus resource center, more than 1million people had died due to COVID-19 by the end of September 2020. Most countries around the world started city lockdowns to prevent the spread of the disease and to save lives. Schools and universities were no exception, with many announcing the cessation of physical classes. Since then, there has been a steadily growing number of online learning classes as a result of the emergency in schools around the globe. Before the epidemic, online learning was running in parallel with physical classroom learning. More that 8 months have passed, and many physical schools still remain closed. In addition, Huang et al. (2020) mentioned that 276 million Chinese students have been unable to return to their schools and universities during this epidemic. The situation in almost all the countries in the world is the same. UNESCO (2020) highlighted that over 1.5 billion students around the world were not able to attend school or university due to the COVID-19 outbreak as of April 4th, 2020.
In this context, educational institutions all over the world have started considering the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to restructure the entire educational system. They have started to not only provide online education, but to develop different tools to allow classes to continue during this epidemic season. These developed online tools can facilitate effective online education. However, due to the sudden appearance of COVID-19, most countries were not prepared for conducting online courses to such an extent. For example, not only did many teachers have to prepare course materials for online teaching, but there was also a lack of learner-friendly interfaces and essential learning features, as well as price issues for third world countries.
However, there are numerous learning tools available for synchronous live teaching such as teaching interaction (Rain-Classroom, the Tencent Ketang Chaoxing Learning app, ClassIn, CCtalk, UMU), Social communication (QQ Group, WeChat Group), Remote office (Welink, Dingtalk, ZOOM, FEISHU, TED), Conversation Online course platforms (icourse, edX, Coursera, Udacity), and so on. There are also asynchronous teaching tools, for example, the course sharing platforms: icourse, edX, Coursera, and Udacity, regional MOOC platforms, CNMOOC, local university MOOC platforms, and so forth (Huang et al., 2020). These tools are appropriate for live teaching courses. There are different kinds of software which can be chosen to satisfy various demands for interaction, network quality or convenience (Huang et al., 2020). However, some of them are not able to be used in certain countries, some are missing some important learning features, and some have complicated user interfaces.
Therefore, it is very important to implement an effective and efficient tool to improve schooling systems and continue classes during the epidemic so that teachers and students can schedule and join meetings anytime and anywhere, thus eliminating the need to travel, and allowing students to be more efficient and productive. Due to COVID-19, foreign faculty/ students cannot travel from one country to another during the semester. China is also following the same rules. To avoid long-term teacher-student isolation, universities in China have applied their own university applications (apps) or tools to continue their classes. The Tencent Meeting tool is one such tool which provides an efficient and reliable video conferencing service powered by Tencent that is built for collaboration. Tencent has released an international version of its cloud-based video conferencing tool across more than 100 markets, including Singapore, India, Japan, Thailand, and Malaysia. In Tencent Meeting, the online learning application can host up to 300 students simultaneously and is available for free on the Google Play and Apple app stores.