Video conferencing was initially developed to meet business needs in a corporate setting, enabling businesses and companies to substitute frequent face-to-face meetings, often costing companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel and lodging expenses, with relatively inexpensive virtual conferences. Video conferencing has also been used extensively to orchestrate seminars involving hundreds of professional participants (also aptly called webinars) to make the process of attending such official events more accessible and cost-effective. Their use in education was limited to large research conferences that required scholars worldwide to participate in such circumstances and provide distance education to students who cannot attain in-person classes for various reasons. However, with the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, the use of video conferencing in academia has sky-rocketed after schools and educational institutions worldwide were forced to shut operations by their local governments to put a check on the deadly virus. This has resulted in schools and universities extensively using video conferencing platforms in their everyday curriculum in order to make up for the gap created by the cancellation of in-person classes. But, with this rushed implementation of a tool designed for industry use, students have had to face their own set of challenges when using these platforms for their regular coursework. This paper provides insight into the use of these video conferencing platforms in academia, the different platforms being used and their comparison, the various challenges the user interface and feature sets of these platforms bring to the students using it for their everyday coursework, and the different ways in which these platforms can be made more academia-friendly for use in academia.