Nine people on the screen is a nice ratio, and if the 10th person says something, they take the place of the person that hasn't said anything the longest on the grid.

There are other reasons I dislike Teams, but this isn't one of them.

This is just a recipe for excluding people who don't speak up. In a larger meeting I particularly want to prompt juniors to speak up, for example. I also want juniors to see each other so they feel more a part of it.

If you are only interested in the last person to speak that's fine but you might as well just use a voice call for that.

I turn my video off during video conference calls, but others may not feel they have the autonomy to do so.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video...

My vision of video conference is that one person is sharing their screen or something, why would I want to watch other peoples avatars or rooms in all kinds of video quality

I'm in the process of "refactoring" my training approach to a videoconference approach (using Zoom).

I'm actually really surprised at how intimidating the process has been. I've been doing training and speaking in person for a long time, but not via Zoom.

It will work out, but the biggest issue that I'm encountering, is not having access to "immediate feedback."

A very good article on the topic was written by a well-known (and extremely effective) trainer, Erica Sadun, here: https://ericasadun.com/2020/03/11/so-youre-going-to-teach-re...

Once i taught a guest lecture in zoom. I ended up using directpoll.com to approach the polling features I'd normally use. Lots of yes/no questions, easily asked and answered (always same url, can watch answers coming in), some exercises.

Extremely positive response. Simple, oft-used interaction truly is a game changer - even if limited to yes/no.

Because it more closely mimics the experience of being in a room. For example maybe I want to listen to, or be, the person speaking while gauging reactions from facial expressions. I have a 30" 4k monitor, I can easily have 20-30 faces on screen at once in software that supports it.

If you read the MS forums there are plenty of complaints about this, a typical use case is a teacher or lecturer who wants to see their entire class.

I am totally OK with the number of faces on screen at once being a user-configurable parameter in the client - but 9 is a hard limit baked into Teams.

Say, "this is how I want the grid to be arranged", and maintain that arrangement over many meetings, with absent people blank and not repacked?

Also, if you are a host/co-host, the order of the "Participants" list keeps shifting. I end up accidentally muting/unmuting people, because their position changed between my moving the cursor over their name, and clicking.

For a service that's probably being marketed a lot at schools, that sounds like a perfect feature for the classroom and you could use it, as well :)

FWIW We are still dealing with the four persons on screen limitation and even then there is a good chance of no one having video. Management wisely decided against forcing the issue. Plus throw in that many times we end up with someone sharing their screen.