Zoom: Scheduling Recurring Meetings

Notice to Instructors:

If scheduling office hours with a class, it is recommended that you create a scheduled meeting for each of the courses you teach. Do not use your personal Zoom Room to host multiple class’ open hours. Create a separate Zoom Room for each section you teach.

Step By Step Instructions

Note: Not all fields are required.

1. Login to Zoom
2. Select on the Sign in button to log into your account.
3. Enter your StarID and Password, select the sign on button.
4. Select on the Meetings link in the left margin navigation
5. Select the button “Schedule a new meeting” on the right side of the screen.
6. Fill out the fields on the page as needed for your upcoming meeting. Here are some things to pay attention to:
   • For organization, it may be best to place your course (or reason for meeting) in the Topic field.
   • Optional: you can add a description for the meeting
   • Fill in the first meeting (or only meeting) date and time
   • Include the duration of the meeting (though understand you are not limited to that time)
   • Don’t change the time zone
   • If you hold office hours on the same day and time of the week, place a check box in Recurring meeting.
     • From the Recurrence dropdown, select weekly
     • How often do you wish to repeat this meeting?
     • On what day of week do you wish to repeat this meeting?
     • Until when? You can select either from the calendar or just say how many occurrences you wish to have
   • Optional: Registration is available; for most cases, unnecessary.
   • Optional: Meeting password can be employed; by default it is employed.
   • Optional: Waiting Room – If enable join before host is unchecked, check this box so students can at least log in and wait. Otherwise, with both unchecked, students will have to keep trying to get into the meeting, waiting for the host to show up.
   • Optional: Require authentication to join is off by default. Probably best practices if you are using this method for office hours along with Waiting Room. If you are bringing in a guest lecturer, you would not select this option.
   • You can set default on video—for host (you) and participants (students). Keep in mind, video drains bandwidth. In a class of 24 students with one instructor, it may be recommended that the instructor is the only one running video (from a technical perspective). For better interactions within the class, it is best to have everyone on camera.
   • Don’t change Audio—Leave at defaulted “Both”.
   • Meeting Options
     • Allow participants to join anytime – by default this is on (checked)
     • Q&A - Your call
     • Mute participants upon entry – Recommended to turn on (checked) if you are setting up class sessions.
     • Breakout Room pre-assigning is available. You can separate your students by their emails or you can upload a CSV.
     • You can automatically record the meetings. When you select to automatically record, select the “In the cloud” option, as that will move the meeting into your mediaspace for later distribution and potentially captioning.
     • Approve or block entry to users from specific regions/countries. We do not have a use case for this at this time.
     • If you are co-teaching/presenting, add them as an alternative host so they will enter the meeting room as a co-presenter.
     • Select the sign language interpreter box if you have an interpreter in your course.
7. When you have made your selections, finish by selecting save.

Distribute Invitation Options

Option 1 (ideal for most connection options): Click on the “Copy the invitation link”; open up Outlook and paste the content into the message body of a new email or meeting request. Place in your participants into the To field and send. This is a great option when you will have SOME attendees that can only join by phone or when you won't be sharing your screen or a presentation. Attendees can also join from a computer, but it's possible not all people will join with that method and would not see shared content. 

Option 2 (ideal for people on a computer or tablet): Select and copy the Join URL. Note: Be careful not to click on the link. You can communicate this link in whatever method you choose. For teaching, it is recommended to enter your class in D2L, create a new Announcement and paste the link where you would like it in your announcement dialogue. This is a great option when you know your attendees with be joining from a computer or tablet, or when you know you want participants to be viewing your screen (like when accessing the Zoom from D2L). Note: include the password for the meeting as well in all of your communications.