Choosing Zoom Setup Options for Course Meetings

There are many instructional situations where Zoom can be helpful, but different situations may benefit from different Zoom settings configurations. This page offers recommended settings for your Zoom sessions based on your situation and purpose. 

Configure your Zoom meeting to match your situation

As a supplement to in-person instruction, Zoom can be useful for online office hours, when the instructor must teach remotely, or when specific students make arrangements with their instructor to attend remotely. Using ​​Zoom for live lectures might also be used during times of disruption to in-person classes, or for courses approved to be fully online.

Below are three ways to schedule and configure your Zoom sessions depending on your situation.

Use Zoom Webinars for very large or public meetings

Zoom Webinars are best if you have more than 500 attendees or if your session is open to the public. This helps to protect student privacy. You can schedule a Webinar from the Zoom web portal. If you don’t have this capability, request the webinar feature from UIT for your Zoom account.

Use Zoom in Canvas for class meetings

Schedule a meeting from the Canvas Zoom tool if you want all students and members of your Canvas course to see meetings and any recordings. These meetings appear in the Canvas Calendar and will generate Canvas event notifications if the meetings are created after you publish your Canvas course. Email notifications are not sent if the Zoom meetings are created before your Canvas course is published (recommended). Zoom Cloud recordings are copied automatically in the Panopto Course Video tool within Canvas where they can be managed by all staff in your course.

Consider these tips for using Zoom in Canvas.

• Add meetings before publishing your Canvas course to avoid over-notifying your students.
• You may have to reduce restrictions in your browser’s tracking and security settings if the Zoom tool doesn’t load in Canvas.
• Upload .csv formatted poll questions in advance because they can’t be created manually.
• Use Chrome or Firefox when using the Canvas Zoom tool. Avoid using Safari.

If someone used the Zoom app or web portal to create a meeting, the person who created the meeting can import the meeting into Canvas by clicking in the top right of the Canvas Zoom tool, selecting Import meeting, then entering the 9-digit meeting code. However, recordings of these meetings will not move to Panopto Course Videos. Note that meetings using a Personal Meeting ID cannot be imported into Canvas.

Use the Zoom app or web portal for section, individual, or accommodation meetings

Scheduling a meeting this way allows you to invite and share the Zoom recordings with just a few students as opposed to scheduling in Canvas where everyone in the course can access it. 

This method is also useful if your course has several sections with separate meetings. We suggest sharing the meeting information with different sections using the Canvas Announcement function. 

Security settings

See the section, "Recommended Settings for Zoom-Based Classes", on UIT's How to protect your Zoom meetings webpage. We also recommend adding a co-instructor or TA as an alternative host so that they can start or manage the meeting in case you are unable to do so yourself.

Recording settings

There are some Zoom meeting and recording settings that you must enable by logging into your Zoom account online and using the following settings on the Recordings tab (This will affect all your Zoom recordings going forward, not just ones for your course)

• Cloud Recording: leave this setting on, and all checkboxes as is, if students are viewing recordings in Zoom. However, if you are directing students to view recordings in Panopto Course Videos, you should:
  • Uncheck Record active speaker with shared screen
  • Check Record the active speaker, gallery view, and shared screen separately, then uncheck Gallery View to hide non-speakers
  • Check Optimize the recording for 3rd party video editor if you want videos to work better in Panopto Course Videos
• Require passcode to access shared cloud recordings: turn this on to auto-generate a new (editable) passcode for every recording.
  • See Managing and sharing cloud recordings for how to share cloud recordings from the Zoom web portal
  • Students will be notified of the passcode by default when viewing cloud recordings in Canvas

Recording Zoom sessions

Before selecting your Zoom recording settings, it is important to be aware of any policies related to privacy, security, copyright, and so on that could affect your situation. Review the policy guidance on recording class sessions. Then consider the following recommendations for your situation.

Managing recordings in Canvas

Zoom sessions scheduled in Canvas and recorded to the cloud on Zoom automatically appear within a few hours to all students in Zoom and the Panopto Course Videos tool of your Canvas course. You and your students can access these recordings from the Panopto Course Videos section of Canvas. Additionally, you and your teaching team can edit and manage the recordings. Note that the Graduate School of Business and the School of Medicine license and operate their own video-capture systems that work differently.

Managing recordings outside of Canvas

In general, course recordings should be shared through the Panopto Course Videos or Zoom tools within Canvas. However, Zoom cloud recordings made outside of Canvas can be used to share a recording with specific individuals, when you don't want to share it with the whole class.

Zoom meetings scheduled with the Zoom app or web portal and recorded to the cloud will appear in the Cloud Recordings section for the meeting host only. You can share, download, delete, and manage cloud recordings.

To share a recording with individuals after the course has concluded, you should first confirm the documented need for access, such as for a student with an incomplete or an instructor in the course. Then refer to these instructions for extending access to Zoom recordings beyond the end of the term.

Reusing recordings for later academic terms

Recordings of class sessions that include any students should only be shared with students enrolled in the course that quarter during the duration of that quarter. If you have a compelling reason to reuse recordings in a later academic term, you should first contact the appropriate Dean’s or Vice Provost’s office for approval. Student privacy must be protected before reusing a recording for different students. Consider the following practices to protect student privacy in recordings.

• Spotlight yourself: Prevent students from appearing in the recording when they speak by spotlighting yourself and any guest speakers who have agreed to be on camera in the recording. 
• Prevent student names from appearing in recording transcripts: Meeting participant names will appear in the transcript if they speak from their own laptop; please mute students and ask them to send questions by private chat to the instructor.
  • When setting up the meeting: In Meeting Options, select Mute participants upon entry.
  • Once the meeting has started: Click Participants in the meeting controls at the bottom of the Zoom window. Click Mute All in the lower right-hand corner of the Manage Participant window.
    • Uncheck Allow participants to unmute themselves.
• Edit or remove student identifiers in Panopto:  For instance, the roster of the course may still be present in the description of the video and should be removed. Go to the Recording for Reuse page for more details on Panopto or contact panoptohelp@stanford.edu for assistance.