Zoom

Looking for a “virtual room” to facilitate online real-time interactions with your students?

Zoom is a web conferencing tool that helps facilitate online synchronous interaction and collaboration.

Zoom’s main features include two-way video, text chat, whiteboards, breakout rooms, polling and recording of meetings. Zoom can be used for a variety of instructional purposes, such as presentations, office hours, class discussions, exam reviews, guest lectures or class group work.

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Zoom transformed my office hours. In the past, only a handful of students would come to in-person office hours. Now, when I offer Zoom office hours, many more students attend. Sometimes students show up just to hear what questions other students are asking! I especially appreciate the raise hand function that lets students queue up without having to wait around in a line. Even when a large group attends, I can easily manage their questions in a fair order. If a student has a sensitive question, we can move to a breakout room for privacy. Sharing screens, using the chat to send links or files, and having the ability to engage multiple students at once makes for a much richer office hours experience for students and for me. Plus, students can join in from anywhere–no looking for parking or waiting for the bus. All they have to do is log in, ask their questions, and they are done. And yes, I still do in-person office hours and enjoy those interactions, but they are not as well attended as Zoom office hours.

”

–Sarah Egan Warren
Assistant Teaching Professor
Institute for Advanced Analytics

Do you need a way to meet with colleagues or students virtually?

Zoom allows you to host meetings, either in teams or one-on-one, online.
Zoom reduces commute times and increases flexibility by allowing participants to meet from any location.
Instructors can record Zoom meetings to allow for hybrid and asynchronous course formats. Zoom’s recording feature can allow users to rewatch meetings or watch meetings they missed.

“Zoom has become an integral part of my courses. Students are already familiar with the program, and it’s very user friendly for setting up small group discussions, sharing content with participants, and the annotation feature allows all participants to contribute and then provides the ability to save an image of the screen with annotations directly through Zoom. I’ve used it for online courses and for adding a HyFlex option to F2F courses. Students are engaged, even when attending class virtually.
”

–Elaine Bohórquez
Teaching Associate Professor
Physiology Graduate Program

How can I increase privacy, inclusion and accessibility with Zoom?

Meeting participants are able to join from a wide range of devices and technologies according to their own needs.
Meeting participants can choose a Zoom background to conceal their surroundings during meetings. Zoom provides many default backgrounds, and students and faculty can create NC State branded backgrounds using the university’s virtual background generator.
Zoom provides the option for meeting participants to display their name and pronouns during meetings.
Meeting hosts can enable live transcription through Zoom to improve accessibility during their meetings.
Zoom provides the option to pay for live professional captioning services and live professional language translation to improve user accessibility and experience.
Zoom provides end-to-end encryption for better data security.
Zoom’s “focus” mode allows meeting hosts to view all participants’ videos without other participants seeing each other to limit distractions for students.

What features make Zoom ideal for virtual classes and meetings?

Zoom breakout rooms allow meeting hosts to send participants into smaller sub-meetings or allow users to self-select into available rooms.
Zoom’s chat function allows meeting participants to send messages to individuals in the meeting or the entire group without turning their microphone on.
Zoom’s waiting room provides the option for meeting hosts to admit participants to the meeting individually or all-at-once.
Screen share allows meeting hosts to display part or all of their computer’s screen for all meeting participants to see.
Zoom scheduling privilege allows users to delegate the ability to schedule meetings to another user.
Zoom offers two separate add-ons for Google Calendar and Gmail. The add-ons allow you to schedule, join and manage meetings via Zoom directly from your calendar or email.