Whether your course is held completely online, face-to-face, or somewhere in between, offering your students the opportunity to meet for office hours remotely rather than just in person is a great way to offer additional flexibility and help meet your students’ needs. With its robust Canvas integration, Zoom is a solid choice for virtual office hours.
Small group activities are a key part of face-to-face learning, but they are also particularly useful in virtual classroom learning environments. Many active learning activities like think-pair-share and collaborative document annotation work well in Zoom using a feature called breakout rooms.
Planning on using Zoom for a virtual classroom course? There’s a lot of great documentation out there on Zoom and the Zoom Canvas integration, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to get started. To help you out, we’ve collected some Zoom guides and repackaged them in a way that covers the basics for instructors—scheduling a meeting, sharing the meeting info, things to consider before your first meeting, running a meeting, and recording a meeting.
One of the decisions many instructors will have to make this year is which video conferencing platform they will use for virtual sessions, office hours, and other meetings that may take place remotely. Since the basic features of video calls with Teams and Zoom are nearly identical, it mostly comes down to personal preference, but we’ve still outlined a few considerations to help you make your decision.
A web recording from one of CATL’s sessions on teaching with Zoom.