Zoom for large classes
Regular UCI Zoom accounts can host meetings with a maximum of 300 simultaneous participants. Instructors teaching large classes with 300 or more students receive additional assistance from Classroom Technologies to ensure that they have the tools they need for their courses.
If you’re teaching a large class and have not yet heard from Classroom Technologies by one month prior to the start of the class, please contact us.
Asynchronous instruction
Many instructors have adapted their content so that their courses are run asynchronously, which means that students access content as their individual schedules and timezones allow, rather than all students being required to attend live sessions at a specific meeting time.
This approach often includes posting videos of lectures or shorter content modules, running online quizzes and other assignments through Canvas, and holding virtual discussion sections and/or office hours to provide opportunities for live interaction. Instructors who are teaching asynchronously and do not need to run live sessions with more than 300 attendees can use their regular UCI Zoom accounts for those live components.
Webinar scheduled on behalf of instructors
The recommended approach for most large classes is to have Classroom Technologies schedule recurring webinars on the instructor’s behalf.
This allows us to support multiple courses with just a small number of (costly) webinar license upgrades.
Webinars are best for lecture-style content delivery. Webinar hosts (instructors) can manually allow participants to share their audio and/or video (if needed) on an individual basis. Webinars come with a built-in Q&A tool to help manage and respond to attendee questions.
There are some caveats: Since multiple courses are scheduled through a single account, each webinar should only be used during scheduled class meeting times to avoid conflicts (you can think of it like a physical classroom space; only one class can take place at a time). Instructors who want to record these sessions are advised to record locally (rather than to Zoom Cloud) so that they can then upload their recordings to YuJa or store/distribute them through other means.
Webinars do not include the ability to use breakout rooms and Zoom’s built-in polling isn’t available because only the account used to schedule the webinar can create polls. Instructors who want to run polls in these webinars may wish to request a Poll Everywhere account. Poll Everywhere is a robust and flexible polling tool that includes support for Canvas integration, a wide variety of polling formats, and the ability to embed and run polls from within Powerpoint or Google slides.
For instructors new to webinars, we highly recommend reviewing resources from Zoom for more information:
- Zoom Webinars training video
- Zoom Webinars reference guide (PDF)
- Zoom’s collection of resources
- Top Questions
In combination with this approach, instructors who need to run a one-off large meeting or webinar outside the regular class meeting times can request free, temporary account upgrades.
Large meeting upgrade
Some instructors choose to teach large courses with live sessions that require student interaction beyond what a webinar can support. For instance, consider a course in which 450 students meet for a live lecture, split apart into breakout rooms for smaller group discussions, and then reconvene as a full class. This approach can be more effort-intensive than a webinar and these instructors may need quarter-long account upgrades to allow them to schedule and run meetings with capacities above 300. UCI has purchased a limited number of meeting upgrades for up to 500 or 1,000 attendees and we are monitoring demand so that we can expand our capacity where needed.
Polling
Instructors who want to run simple, multiple-choice polls in any kind of Zoom meeting or webinar can use Zoom’s built-in polling tool. For other contexts or more robust polling options, Poll Everywhere is available campus-wide.