Usefulness of Free Conference Call (FCC) in Digital Learning Platform: A Comparative Study using Users' Perception and Economical Compatibility

The outbreak of the present pandemic coronavirus (official designation COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2) has a clear negative impact on academic and research activities. Issues created by such pandemic viz. loss of communication; shut down of school, college and universities; disruption of the formal learning process; damage of print materials, etc. provoke the transformation of the learning process from conventional to digital. A sophisticated & multitasking platform for online learning is the primary requirement of this transformation, which conforms to the 5A's of access, i.e., Availability, Adequacy, Accessibility, Affordability, and Appropriateness. It bridges the digital divide by ensuring equal access to the web for all. In this paper, the authors have conducted a comparative analysis between the most commonly used web-conferencing tools (viz. FCC, ZOOM, GTM, Join.me & Cisco WebEx) in India, both in terms of users’ & economic perspective. The Users’ perspective was determined by conducting a short online survey using a Google form questionnaire. The survey contains 450 respondents equally distributed among three sample groups, viz. Students, faculty members & library professionals. And the Economical compatibility is identified by solely using the tools & check their pricing & plans. After evaluation & comparison, the study identified that the tool FCC (Free Conference Call), can use by learners and educators as an alternative solution to the physical classroom. This is a dissemination or sharing platform and the most versatile and comprehensive free web-conferencing solution which can be used by academic institutions and educators for online classes. Besides, this paper also goes through a basic overview of 5 A’s of access and provides sufficient evidence that FCC meets all the five criteria of accessibility to clarify the judgment of its acceptance