Zoom Into Online Learning

Online learning in action

Faculty often express concern over how to maintain personal relationships with their students in an online course space; incorporating optional synchronous elements to an online course can help “put a face” to a name. Zoom, the video conferencing tool that allows you to create synchronous experiences for their students, has become ubiquitous in educational and businesses in the past two years.

As online learning environments continue to gain popularity, it is critical to keep abreast of the top tools and features available. While many will have a basic knowledge of Zoom by now (though by no means all), everyone can learn how to better utilize Zoom to improve lecture creation, help increase student engagement, and offer interesting, alternative ways to personalize your classroom.

The following features can offer creative ways to use Zoom to enhance your teaching:

Lecture Creation

1. Record your lectures and screenshares through Zoom and then upload the saved files to your course via announcements or a discussion post for personalized presentations.

2. Bring subject matter experts (SMEs) to your virtual classroom by recording interviews and one-on-one discussions and linking them in your course.

3. Enable the annotation settings to provide explanatory notes on screen during a lecture or while recording feedback.

4. Try recording yourself interacting with one of your instructional resources. Instead of simply assigning an article for your class to read, record yourself as you review and respond to the article, highlighting important pieces within the material.

Facilitate Student Engagement

5. Build community in your online learning environment by hosting virtual office hours.

6. Practice Think-Pair-Share by using breakout rooms in your optional synchronous sessions.

7. Encourage student-led virtual sessions; let students take the reins by enabling and adding the co-host feature.

8. Utilize Zoom’s polling for meetings feature and create multiple choice questions to be released to the Zoom participants during your synchronous session. The results can then be downloaded and reviewed.

Personalize your Classroom

9. Create a personalized Zoom URL to help easily schedule spontaneous meetings.

10. Bring the experience to your students with virtual field trips and tours. FieldTripZoom can offer some inspiration.

11. Enable virtual backgrounds and use a green screen to create visual interest or helpful demonstrations.

12. Use Emojis in the chat or as a “meeting reaction,” which displays an Emoji on your video panel for ten seconds.

Try a few of the Zoom features in your next online course! We highly recommend recording your synchronous sessions and providing the recording to students to allow flexibility for asynchronous users. If you begin recording, Zoom will automatically save the recording to your computer files upon the completion of the meeting. You can then post an announcement to students highlighting particularly salient aspects of the meeting and include a link to the recorded session for their review.

If you would like to learn more about how to use Zoom or its various features, please review the Zoom Video Tutorials available through The Zoom Help Center, which offers a variety of helpful tutorials, guides, and videos and is accessible to the public (consider sharing with your students)!