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I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2020. This blog is archived and no updates will be made to it.
March 15, 2020
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Last updated Sundary, March 22
As in-person lectures shift to an online medium, there's been a lot of questions over how exactly instructors will be handling this. This semester, I am a teaching assistant for Dr. Chand John's CS 312 class. We are a lecture-based class with 100 students in each lecture section, with discussion sections where we administer quizzes. When we heard Provost McInnis's directive to move classes like ours online, we immediately got to work making Zoom work for our class.
Below, I've recorded a tutorial that gives an overview of how the CS 312 instructional staff is planning to use Zoom in CS 312 and our recommendations for instructors to have the best experience possible on Zoom.
Addendum to this video: After trial and error, if you feel that you do not wish to spam your students with Canvas notifications and you do not want to make it available on the Zoom tab of your Canvas page, then we recommend creating scheduling meetings from utexas.zoom.us, the official portal for UT Austin Zoom, rather than doing it from the Zoom tab of your Canvas video. This will allow finer grain configuration of your meetings, as well as the added benefit of not spamming your students with 30 Canvas notifications at a time. However, your meeting will not show up on the Zoom tab on the class Canvas page, so you would need to share the meeting ID manually with students via a Canvas announcement.
Lectures, discussion sections, examinations, and office hours should all be moved to Zoom if at all possible. Zoom works well for all of these activities because of the different settings you can configure for your Zoom meeting. Below, I'll detail the best way to configure Zoom meetings for each activity. All of these activities should have their own scheduled Zoom meetings as opposed to ad hoc meetings that are shared with students at the last minute.
You can do so via the Zoom tab on your class's Canvas page. A walkthrough is available on the video. If you do so via the Zoom tab, then your scheduled Zoom meeting will appear automatically so that your students can automatically see it. Finer grained controls for the meeting are then available if you visit utexas.zoom.us.
Addendum to this video: After trial and error, if you feel that you do not wish to spam your students with Canvas notifications and you do not want to make it available on the Zoom tab of your Canvas page, then we recommend creating scheduling meetings from utexas.zoom.us, the official portal for UT Austin Zoom, rather than doing it from the Zoom tab of your Canvas video. This will allow finer grain configuration of your meetings, as well as the added benefit of not spamming your students with 30 Canvas notifications at a time. However, your meeting will not show up on the Zoom tab on the class Canvas page, so you would need to share the meeting ID manually with students via a Canvas announcement.
These are just recommendations. I justify some of the selections in my video.
For lecture:
For discussions/recitations:
For examinations:
For office hours:
There are additional meeting settings that you can configure at https://utexas.zoom.us/profile/setting.
Lectures should have every student muted on join. When the instructor joins, they can choose whether to enable their camera or not, but this is not necessary. Once they are ready to speak, they should unmute themselves but not other students. More than likely, the instructor should share their screen. There are several different things they can share:
During the lecture, students can send reactions to the professor. Some reactions include: yes, no, speed up, slow down, thumbs up, thumbs down, take a break, etc. These reactions don't interrupt the instructor while they are speaking but provide instantaneous feedback to the instructor when they are free to view the Zoom participants list (where the reactions are shown).
Depending on whether you wish to allow for students to chat during the Zoom chat, you can enable or disable this feature. It's a good idea to have this feature, especially if you can have a TA help monitor your Zoom meeting.
To add a TA or another instructor as a co-host of your Zoom meeting, you can configure your meeting
and add them by their EID followed by @eid.utexas.edu. For instance, for someone with the EID
abc1234, you can do: abc1234@eid.utexas.edu.
Zoom offers a polling feature that allows instructors to run polls similar to iClicker or Squarecap. In order to use this as a replacement to iClicker, you will need to require students to pre-register for the Zoom meeting. This is somewhat annoying, so I don't recommend it. However, if you just want to run anonymous polls and get the aggregate response, then Zoom polls are great.
More information on polls here: Zoom polls
If you want to facilitate small group discussions, you can use breakout rooms. (Information on managing breakout rooms: Managing video breakout rooms)
Breakout rooms are not an option that needs to be enabled in the meeting settings. You create them on the fly within the Zoom application.
Depending on how your discussion or recitation is conducted, you'll want to adopt something similar to the recommendations for lectured I've shared in the above section.
If you want to facilitate small group discussions, you can use breakout rooms. (Information on managing breakout rooms: Managing video breakout rooms)
Breakout rooms are not an option that needs to be enabled in the meeting settings. You create them on the fly within the Zoom application.
To be honest, exams and quizzes are most likely the most awkward to proctor over Zoom. If you do not mind your students paying $20 per exam session, you can use ProctorU or a similar solution. However, ProctorU can get costly if you require more than just a few exams/quizzes, and they require students to install privacy-invasive software that I personally do not find very comfortable using/requiring my students to use.
However, from what other universities have begun to do, examinations and quizzes can still be proctored from Zoom if possible. Here is what will need to be done:
The largest limitation Zoom has: only one shared screen may be viewed at a time. My recommendation is for the proctor to cycle through each of the shared screens while keeping an eye on every student's camera, which can be seen all at the same time.
Due to Zoom's limitations, I recommend placing exams on Canvas. It logs every student's action, from how much time they spent on each question, when they changed questions, to important things such as whether they clicked out of their Canvas browser window. This audit log is very useful for ensuring students do not cheat by clicking away from Canvas. For coding classes, HackerRank quizzes offer similar benefits and are recommended for ensuring academic integrity is upheld.
The UT Faculty Innovation Center is strongly encouraging faculty to give open-note examinations. Given the headache I went through writing this section of this post, as well as the headache it will be to cycle through dozens of students' webcams and screens, I recommend this as well.
Update: Instructors may install a tool called Proctorio on their Canvas course pages to proctor their exams instead. UT Austin has a Proctorio license. See this page for more information about using Proctorio: https://utexas.instructure.com/courses/633028/pages/proctorio-lock-down-browser-tool
If you want to talk with students one at a time, I recommend creating a breakout room for you and that student to be in, while the other students who are waiting in line can converse among themselves in the main room.
(Information on managing breakout rooms: Managing video breakout rooms)
I don't recommend using a waiting room for office hours. That would allow you to keep students waiting until the host (you, the instructor) let them in manually. I prefer breakout rooms because they let the students do something productive while they wait for your help. If you want to enable a waiting room, you can enable this option on the meeting settings.
Unlike the waiting room, breakout rooms are not an option that needs to be enabled in the meeting settings. You create them on the fly within the Zoom application.
If you want to schedule one-to-one office hours, you can schedule a meeting through the Zoom application or online at utexas.zoom.us as well.
To keep a line, I recommend using an online line-up system that I developed for CS 312. You can see it in action here and if you want to use it for your class as well, email wang@cs.utexas.edu for details. Two options exist:
There are a few ways students can join your Zoom meetings. The least confusing method is by scheduling your meeting on your Canvas course's Zoom tab. The video above walks you through on how to do this.
Alternatively, for private meetings that are for specific students, I recommend either letting them join your own meeting room, which I also show how to get the information for that near the end of the video, or schedule your own meeting through the Zoom website/app and share the 9 digit meeting ID. For instance, 123-456-789 is an example Zoom meeting ID. Attendees can then go to the Zoom app, press Join, and put in this 9 digit meeting ID into Zoom to join that specific meeting.
We sent the following announcement to our students: A guide for students to use Zoom
The UT Austin Faculty Innovation Center and LAITS Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services are spearheading campus-wide efforts to help faculty transition online. Visit the Instructional Continuity page for more details.
I'm linking their site because they are the official resource for the university. That being said, some of their recommendations differ from those on here. While it is up to you to decide which to follow, I would like to note that their recommendations have been created out of obligation (of their jobs) and not from experience. The recommendations I've given here are the options we have decided to pursue as instructional staff for a real class after dry runs with students.
This guide is still under construction. If you have any suggestions on what to add to this guide, or if you have any questions about any part of this guide, please let me know. My email address is wang@cs.utexas.edu. Don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions. We are all in this together.
Alternatively, official support is provided by the Faculty Innovation Center and LAITS.
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