How my classes are moving to distributed teams

I am fortunate that my classes are fairly small and they have all already completed at least one iteration with a team. I want to just leave a quick note here about what we're doing with the transition to distributed work.

In CS490—the game studio—we already have Slack set up for the team. I reached out to my network to ask about good tools for distributed Pair Programming, and the clear winner, given our other constraints, was the paid version of Slack. They handled my request for an academic discount quickly, and so as of yesterday, we were on the Standard plan. Those who sang Slack's praises gave high regard to its ability to "remote control" other team member's computers, which is a requirement for anything like distributed pairing or mobbing. Unfortunately, that feature was removed from Slack a year ago. I'm not sure how that disconnect happened. My university has already paid for WebEx, so I looked into that, but remote control requires installing the Access Anywhere application, and the documentation on how to do that is just wrong—or maybe my university bought a different package or something. In any case, no luck there. Two students mentioned Zoom, so I looked into that, and after doing a little dual-account dance in a test Slack, I was able to confirm that it works fine for allowing remote control. It also seems that we can do it at no cost for our team size, which is great. Unfortunately, I figured all of this out after the regular meeting time for the student teams, so they were not able to try facilitating their meetings with the Zoom add-on.

Meanwhile, in CS222, they just finished their first iteration of the final project. Yesterday, I hung out on Canvas Chat and answered one question. My current plan is to use that during "class hours" and then switch to Canvas Conferences for group voice conversations. It didn't come up yesterday, so I cannot comment on how well it worked. I set up some new assignments for them that more carefully scaffold and make asynchronous some activities that I would have otherwise done in class. Each team had to submit a communication plan last night, which I need to look over today; I already gave them a gentle nudge toward using Slack rather than text messages, and I am curious if they followed my advice. By Wednesday, they need to submit a plan for Iteration 2. I expected more teams to reach out to me with questions about my feedback on Iteration 1, but none did; this could mean that they are not taking it seriously, or it could mean that the extra time I took trying to be as explicit as possible paid off.

UPDATE: A few hours after posting this, the university announced that Canvas Conferences was instituting a limit of 10 concurrent meetings university-wide. Well, that quickly became unusable. I've posted to my class and informed them that I'll plan to use Zoom with them as well.