Zoom is available to all Northwestern faculty, staff, and students on the left-hand navigation of Canvas courses or through Northwestern's Zoom page.

Zoom provides:

video and audio support for up to 100 concurrent participants
meeting support for up to 300 concurrent participants
high-quality recordings (including editable transcripts) of meetings stored in the cloud
integration with both Canvas and Panopto (Northwestern's video management platform)

Updates to Zoom

Zoom's creators listen to user feedback and are alert to changing synchronous meeting technologies. Therefore, updates to Zoom are frequent.

This training course is frequently updated, but you will find the most current information at Northwestern's Zoom page and supporting documentation from Zoom.

Zoom Features

Zoom offers several features and are explained by clicking the associated links:

Zoom features for facilitating class

Sharing visuals
Waiting room
Customize the waiting room screen
Whiteboard
Annotation
Breakout rooms
Chats

Meeting Roles: Host, Alternative Host, and Co-Host

You may require support to assist with in-meeting tasks such as managing the chat, starting and stopping recording, admitting students from the waiting room, and managing breakout rooms. Some of these tasks will require you to make a participant a co-host, or even host, of the meeting. You will learn how to add a co-host later in this training.

Take a few minutes now to read this information on what controls are and are not available to co-hosts: Enabling and adding a co-host

Zoom has different capabilities and permissions for managing meetings. These roles are shown below:

Details of various tasks are explained in this link: Roles in a meeting

Becoming a Co-Host or Host

It's important that instructors schedule their own Zoom meetings. This means you will start the meetings as host. During the meeting, you can add co-hosts very easily, and temporarily, pass host privileges to others so they can help you manage the meeting. The original host is the only role that can assign co-hosts or pass host privileges.