Zoom is probably the most successful video conferencing platform in history. During the pandemic, it became a verb. "Let's Zoom" means video call to millions of people.
It's reliable, easy to use, and works well for what it was designed to do. The thing is: it was designed for business meetings, not education. And that design choice shapes everything.
The Business Meeting Model
Zoom was founded in 2011 as an enterprise video conferencing solution. Its target users were business professionals who needed reliable video calls for:
- Team meetings
- Sales calls with clients
- Webinars and presentations
- One-on-one conversations
In this context, participants are typically adults who manage themselves. Meetings are largely one-way (presenter to audience) or round-table discussion (everyone in one conversation). Breakout sessions, when they happen, are brief divergences from the main meeting.
Zoom excels at all of this. It's genuinely good video conferencing software for business use cases.
How Education Is Different
Teaching — especially small-group tutoring — works differently:
Students need supervision. Unlike business professionals, students (especially younger ones) require oversight. They go off-task. They get stuck. They need guidance that doesn't require explicit request.
Breakout rooms are core, not supplementary. In tutoring and small-group teaching, breakout rooms aren't a brief activity — they're often the main event. Small group work is where learning happens.
Teachers need awareness of multiple groups. In a classroom, a teacher overseeing group work can see all groups at once. They notice confusion, hear off-topic conversation, identify who needs help. This awareness is fundamental to teaching.
Access control matters more. In business, a meeting link is fine — anyone you share it with is presumably supposed to be there. In education, especially with minors, open access creates safety concerns.
Where the Mismatch Shows
Zoom's business-first design creates specific pain points for educators:
One room at a time: The biggest limitation. You can only be in one breakout room at a time. Joining Room A means losing all visibility of Rooms B, C, and D. This isn't a bug — it's how the feature was designed, because business breakouts don't require continuous teacher oversight.
No audio monitoring: You can't hear multiple rooms simultaneously. The natural awareness a teacher has in a physical classroom — hearing the general buzz, noticing which groups sound stuck — doesn't exist.
Link-based access: Zoom's default is sharing meeting links. Anyone with the link can join. "Zoom bombing" became a recognized problem during the pandemic. Restricting access requires additional configuration.
Features designed for presentation: Zoom has excellent webinar features, screen sharing, recording, virtual backgrounds — all things that matter for business presentations. The features specific to active teaching (real-time oversight of student work) received less attention.
Zoom's Education Features
Zoom has added education-focused features over time. Zoom for Education includes things like attendance reports, LMS integration, and enhanced breakout room controls.
These help. But they're additions to a product designed around different assumptions. The core architecture — one room at a time, link-based access as default — remains business-oriented.
This isn't a criticism of Zoom's quality. It's an observation about design priorities. A product can't be optimal for every use case.
Is Zoom Good Enough?
For many teaching contexts, yes. If you're doing primarily lecture-style teaching to a large group, Zoom works well. If your breakout rooms are occasional brief activities, the limitations are manageable.
The friction becomes significant when:
- Breakout room work is your primary teaching format
- You need to monitor multiple groups simultaneously
- You're working with younger students who need more oversight
- Access control for minors is a priority
For tutoring centers and language schools where small-group work is core, these limitations affect daily workflows significantly.
The Alternative
Platforms designed specifically for education start from different assumptions. They treat breakout room monitoring as a core feature, not an edge case. They build access control into the basic architecture. They optimize for teaching workflows rather than business meetings.
We built Simpleclass with these priorities. Our breakout room monitoring lets you see and hear multiple rooms at once. Students are invited by email and have accounts — no open links. The whole platform is designed around how teaching actually works.
Zoom remains excellent software. It just wasn't built for what tutoring centers need. Understanding that helps you make better tool choices.