Teaching with Zoom

Since Zoom gives you the opportunity to invite "the whole world" via a webinar or large Zoom meeting, it is possible to create interest for the course in advance.

Combining advertising with an open seminar can do wonders to attract students to your course in a cheap way. The opportunity to ask moderated questions directly should not be underestimated.

• Learn more about Zooms Webinar
• Learn how to create secure meetings
• Tips for public meetings

Why not use the opportunity to invite everyone who has been accepted to the course to a preparatory seminar via the welcome letter, where you tell about the course and answer questions? It can be the difference between accepting or not.

• Learn more about Zoom Webinars
• Learn how to create secure meetings

This mainly applies to distance courses, but can of course be combined with a physical campus meeting.

By creating a meeting that requires login via the LNU account, you get a correct list of participants that you can check off against registered students and can hold your introductory meeting live.

The point of requiring login is that students must create their LNU account and register for the course in order to be able to attend the compulsory course start meeting. It puts a little extra pressure on the students to fix these things in time, but is of course not necessary. You can also create a regular meeting but then lose some control.

• Learn to schedule a meeting
• Learn to set up meetings in different ways
• Learn all about screen sharing

Zoom is, of course, an excellent tool to use to hold seminars during the course. There are a few different ways you can create these seminars that have their pros and cons.

Create meetings via the Zoom Meetings activity in Moodle

The easiest way to create a meeting / seminar in Moodle is to use the Zoom Meeting activity. The advantage of this is that the students get a button to press (when it is time for the meeting) and enter directly. No one else will come in because you did not spread the link via email or otherwise.

• Learn more about Zoom meetings
• Learn all about screen sharing

A recurrent meeting means that you create a meeting that is set up to recur several times over a period of time.

The advantage of this is that you can keep the same meeting link and settings throughout the period. You can also (from version 5.10) save your settings for the breakout rooms.

The downside is that your needs may change during the journey and it will then be more complicated to be flexible. Sometimes it can be a better idea to put a new meeting link in its context with a title that directly connects to the part of the course.

• Learn all about recurrent meetings

Zoom Bookings is an activity you can add to one or more sections in the course.

Inside the activity, you and your students can create new zoom meetings, all of which are listed inside the activity.

The advantage of this is that all meetings are gathered within the side of this activity and become clear without cluttering the course room in general.

• Learn more about Zoom Bookings

Zoom gives you the opportunity to let the participants answer questionnaires, take polls (like using Mentimeter) and even do quizzes during a meeting.

You can present the result to the participants directly or download it as .csv files for further processing in Excel afterwards.

In addition, when the meeting ends, you can automatically send the participants to a prepared survey done in Zoom, or via external tools such as Survey & Report or Google Forms.

• Learn about polls and quizzes during the meeting
• Learn about launching surveys at the end of the meeting

Zoom makes it very easy to record all or part of the meeting.

You can record what happens in the meeting, those who participate and what is shared via the screen. The recording can either be stored locally on your computer as a movie file, or automatically sent to the host's LnuPlay account, a so-called cloud recording.

You can then choose to distribute the film via a link or embedded in your course room on Moodle.

The important thing to keep in mind is that you need to get approval from those who are in the meeting before you make the recording. Do not forget this!

• Learn more about recording
• How to do a cloud (LnuPlay) recording
• How to record a presentation
• Learn more about sharing media with others
• Learn more about using video in Moodle

Zoom is really good for meeting the students one by one (or in groups) when you supervise.

By combining the Appointment activity with a meeting link, you can let the students choose free time slots that you have specified and meet them individually or in groups.

By using your personal meeting ID for these slots, you do not have to create new meetings for each time but instead you're able to use the same link.

Another tip here is to use the Dialog activity to have a written dialogue with the student during the process where you can easily exchange files and feedback in a secure way.

Learn about Appointments
Learn about personal meeting ID
Learn about Dialogue

Zoom with its channels is excellent for collaborating over time, both with colleagues in the teaching team but also within a course.

Since both students and staff have the same functions in Zoom, there is nothing to prevent students from creating their own course or group channels where they can collaborate. As staff, it is really effective to have a channel for collaboration in teacher teams, projects or other groups.

The advantages of a Zoom channel are that everyone has a communication channel where everyone is reached in an easy way. You can share files, links, tips and ideas, photos, short videos. Discuss, ask questions and so on. At the same time, it is easy to start a meeting with the group members, it is just a push of a button inside the channel and everyone in the group is called.

• Learn about channels and how you can collaborate

Why not create a channel for everyone in the course?

As a staff, you can add all students and teachers to a course and then have an easy way to reach everyone in the course, both "live" and asynchronously. Students get a natural way to communicate with their classmates and can be social in a more direct way.

As a teacher in the course, you can agree with the students how often you will be "live" in the channel and therefore reachable. Students can not directly contact or add staff to their own channels, but as staff you can do the opposite.

• Learn about channels and how you can collaborate

The students' group work can of course take place via Zoom.

You as a teacher do not have to facilitate this by creating your own meeting rooms for the students, as we did in the Adobe Connect era.

Because all students can easily create meetings just like you, they can handle it themselves. The disadvantage of creating meetings for students is that those meetings actually count as your meetings (you are always the host for it) and it creates problems if you want to have your own meetings at the same time.

So our recommendation is to never create meetings for the students. Instead, it is recommended to use the Zoom-Booking activity.

By adding such an activity to a course element, naming it "Group meetings" or something, the students themselves can create a meeting there, name it "Group 1" and then decide for themselves how and when to use it.

A tip here is to tell the students who will be responsible in each group and refer them to the Participant List in the course room (course menu "Participants") where they can use the filter at the top to show only those who belong to their own Moodle group and then invite the right people. Or they simply click on "their" group and have enough discipline not to join fellow students group meetings in Zoom.

• Learn more about Zoom Bookings

Breakout rooms is a way to virtually divide your Zoom meeting into several different meeting rooms where participants can discuss in groups.

You can create breakout rooms either before the meeting or during the current meeting, name them logically and then either automatically distribute the participants or do it manually.

There are opportunities for students to change breakout rooms if desired, to record the session in the group, call for help from the teacher and much more.

You as the host and your potential co-hosts can always move around the breakout rooms and "check on progress". You can also stay in the main room and from there send out notifications or even a powerpoint picture to the breakout rooms. Video with audio can also be distributed to the breakout rooms, for example to give them new conditions for discussion.

If you use recurring meetings (meetings with the same ID each time), you can save how you divide the students into groups until the next time the same meeting takes place.

Learn more about breakout rooms
How to let the participants change rooms
Create breakout rooms in advance
Divide content into breakout rooms

When it's time for students to present something in the course, either individually or in groups, there are some smart tools to use in Zoom.

The gallery view, that is the view when you see all the participants as small video frames in an array, is something that you can sort. For example, you can put those who have the "main role" in the top row and then you can push that sorting out to the other participants so that everyone sees the same thing as you do.

You can also use the spotlight function to put the light on one or more participants during the meeting. They are then presented with larger pictures than the other participants and come into focus.

Students often present something in groups, and it is not uncommon for them each to present their part. To facilitate the control of slide changes in Powerpoint, there is a smart function. The person who shares their screen can give the control over the image change (Slide Control) to one or more others in the meeting. Then they can easily control their own part of the presentation and do not have to tell the screen sharer when and what to click on.

• Read more about the Spotlight function and the gallery view
• Read more about Slide control

Since students have exactly the same opportunities in Zoom as staff, it is a good idea to tell students what they can do.

One example is that students can use Zoom as a recording studio.

Either individually or during a group meeting, they can share their screen, show a presentation and record it all via Zoom. That film they can then easily be uploaded to LnuPlay via Moodles my media and published in the course, maybe via a forum?

• Read about using Zoom for recording as a student