Get started:

Create meetings:

Guide students:

Suggested Settings for Teaching:

Zoom has many features that can optimized to meet your pedagogical goals and make your course run smoothly. It is best to familiarize yourself with the settings and choose what works best for your course meetings. Some features (like Polling and Breakout Rooms) need to be enabled before meetings start, while others can be changed within a meeting in real time.

These account settings must be activated before your meeting begins:

To change your account settings, login to uoregon.zoom.us and select “Settings” on the side menu.

  • Breakout RoomsTurning this feature on allows you to create smaller rooms for student discussion.
  • Polling – Must be turned on in account settings to allow this feature. You can use this tool to collect feedback or replace clicker-type questions to support active learning.
  • Closed captioning – Zoom provides some automated captioning that can be automatically added to recorded sessions. See more information here.
  • File Transfer – Not recommended, this allows sharing of files within chat tool. If student’s need to share materials, they could achieve this within a canvas assignment, discussion board, or within a canvas group.

These settings can be modified within your meeting  (Unless turned off in your account settings (see above))

  • Chat – Recommended for students asking questions and sharing resources among the class.
  • Private Chat – This is like students passing notes in class; we recommend turning this feature off for classes.
  • Screen Sharing – This is a handy tool for displaying your own slides, readings, or materials during a zoom session but consider disabling participant sharing  unless you intend to have students share something from their screen.
  • Annotation – This tool allows participants to annotate your screen as you present. We recommend disabling unless you intend to have students interact with your presentations.
  • Whiteboard – This tool allows participants to share a whiteboard within zoom. This can be a good option for student sharing content or reporting out to the class with text or simple illustrations.
  • Waiting room – This setting allows you to decide individually which attendees can enter your meeting. This is a good option for office hours or small group meetings but not for large meetings because attendees cannot join a meeting until a host admits them individually from the waiting room.

Encourage interaction and engagement:

  • Be explicit about how you want students to engage in your Zoom class sessions. In small groups (<20) it is possible for students to un-mute themselves and contribute verbally. However, in larger groups you may want students to raise hands or use the chat to indicate they have something to contribute. Remember to leave your “manage participants” and “chat” windows open and check them regularly so you don’t miss an opportunity for students to engage.
  • Use Polling to facilitate active student engagement. Just like clicker questions you can ask multiple choice questions and display results back to your class. Students learn the most from these activities when they first select an answer, then get to discuss their answers and reasoning, and re-submit an answer. You can use breakout rooms to create space for small group discussion.
  • Use Breakout Rooms to get the conversation started. Just like in person classes, allowing students time to think independently and then discuss in a small group helps to increase student participation. Pose a question, allow time for student thinking, and then break them into groups of 2-4. Once students are in a breakout room you can broadcast a message to every group to remind them of the prompt (Click Breakout Rooms in the meeting controls, then Broadcast a message to all). Students in breakout rooms can also “ask for help” (a button appears in their breakout room) and you can drop in to any breakout room (click “join” in your breakout room window).
  • In addition to randomly assigning groups, you can create “Persistent Breakout Rooms” and assign set students. If you teaching with long-term groups, this might be a good option.

Be Proactive about “Zoom-bombing

There have been some reports of disruptions in Zoom classrooms across the country. Take these steps below to prevent most cases and be ready to respond if any disturbance does occur.

  • Create and share zoom meetings within Canvas – don’t publish links publicly.
  • Set a password for entry in to your zoom session. This makes it much, much harder to get into a random meeting for someone you didn’t invite. You should be able to select this option any time you schedule a meeting.

You can also prevent disruptions in your course with these settings below:

  • Prevent participants from screen sharing. During a call, click the arrow next to Share Screen and then Advanced Sharing Options – then Under “Who can share?” choose “Only Host”
  • Turn of file transfer in your account settings

If there is a course disruption, make sure you know how to manage participants. We recommend leaving your “manage participants” menu open so you can see raised hands and quickly access these options below by hovering over the participants name.

  • Mute participants
  • Remove unwanted participants (select More and then “Remove”)
  • Disable participant video (select More and then “Stop Video”)

You can watch a recording of our TEP/UO Online workshop on using Zoom for instruction. The Chat logs for both Zoom workshops are here.

Follow-up to questions raised in the workshop:

What is a Zoom recording actually recording?

Zoom records in speaker view (so would capture participants’ faces when they speak) and chat (as a separate file), but not the breakout rooms.

TEP’s Austin Hocker suggests that a good bet is to use “spotlight” view, which allows the host to select which video they want to be in front of students. You can select your own video (click the three dot menu at the top of your own self-view and select ”spotlight”).

An alternative is to set your settings to “record active speaker with shared screen” and tell students you are recording and that if they don’t want their video included they can turn it off.

screen shot of Zoom's recording settings

 

And this setting to display a disclaimer to students when you are recording.

screen shot of Zoom disclaimer settings

 

 

 

 


 How do we be aware of/proactive about connectivity during Zoom sessions?

  • we should be normalizing connectivity challenges so students don’t give up;
  • instructors can advise students to turn off video to decrease bandwidth;
  • polling and breakout rooms aren’t an additional drag on connectivity;
  • instructors can download info about who participated and for how long.

As with everything this term, record theses sessions and everything have a backup way for students to engage asynchronously if they need to.