Live Classes

Live Classes

Zoom offers live online interaction with students at a regularly scheduled class time.

• For detailed information, you can access an OIT training session or review the Zoom training videos at https://go.byu.edu/zoomtraining.
• For a quick refresher, review these Zoom Basics and the Zoom Cheat Sheet and FAQs document for more information.
• You can also share your computer screen in Zoom [video tutorial].
• Print this sheet of Zoom keyboard shortcuts (for Mac) or this sheet of shortcuts (for PC).

BYU's standard Zoom license allows meeting organizers to have 300 participants in each meeting. Special licenses can be extended for meetings of 500 and 1000 participants.

Use a classroom response system to create in-class quizzes, interactive lecture questions, mark attendance, and hold live discussions. We suggest using one of these three options:

• iClicker Cloud is offering a FREE site license to students enrolled in BYU courses through the end of the semester (faculty accounts have always been free).
• Top Hat is offering FREE student licenses to BYU professors and students during the current semester. Detailed instructions are available at support.tophat.com.

Recommendations and Suggestions

Class Structure

• Practice, practice, practice and then be patient and cheerful when things don’t work as you plan or you can’t find what you need in real time. Students take their cues from us!
• Put a “Class in Session” sign on your office door (to limit interruptions).
• Open the Zoom link early and encourage students to enter early to chat—just like a classroom
• Have a screen welcoming the students and music playing so students can test and troubleshoot their audio before class starts.
  • If you want to share audio from your computer (whether you're playing a video or music as suggested here), click the button in the lower left corner that says “share computer audio” on the Share menu when you are selecting the screen you want to share.
• Continue your classroom experience by asking a student to start with a prayer. Prayers through Zoom are great!
• Send an agenda to students so they know what to expect for class. For example:
  • Housekeeping
  • Guest Speaker (15 minutes)
  • Divide into breakout rooms (20 minutes)
  • Return to main room for class discussion
• Leave time at the end of class for students to go into breakout rooms and plan for how to stay connected and help one another with the material until the next class period.

Interacting with Students

• Mute participants by default when students join (do this automatically in the meeting settings)
• If possible, have 2 people helping with the course (a TA would be great). The faculty member can deliver the course content while the TA can manage Zoom (monitor chat, be responsible for recording, help with breakout rooms).
• Make use of the chat feature
  • Encourage students to ask questions in real time in the chat function. The TA can respond to the chat and be prepared to share the questions from the chat with the faculty member when they stop periodically to ask questions.
  • Many students prefer to type their questions rather than unmute and speak to the whole class. This also reduces interruptions for you and ensures that questions aren't forgotten.
• Use Zoom interactions
  • Ask students to respond using the buttons in the participants panel (yes or no, like or dislike, go faster or go slower).
  • Create a Zoom poll with multiple options and let students respond.
    • Show the class the poll results as a starting point for further discussion.
• Use breakout rooms for smaller group discussion
  • You will probably need to have a TA help manage this so that you as an instructor can participate in the discussions.
  • When groups are in breakout rooms, you can stay in the main room and ask one member of the breakout room to come back to the main room if their group has questions and then that member can return to their breakout room.
  • Pause the recording when students go into breakout rooms.

Recording your Zoom Sessions

• Cloud: Most have reported good success with recording directly to the cloud.
• Local: This will save a file to your local computer. You will need enough space.
• Saves video + audio, audio only, and chat history.
• Some have reported that it takes a bit of time to convert after you finish recording.
• You can make smaller videos of the class session by stopping the recording after each topic and then starting it again.