Moodle@Converse

External resources

• Zoom's Help Center: articles and one-minute videos on all things Zoom
• Download Center for the Zoom app
• Zoom help category and focused article on scheduling meetings
• Host/co-host controls in a meeting
• Preventing Zoom bombing

Zoom account

You will need a Zoom account to schedule a Zoom meeting. Your students should also sign up for (free) Zoom accounts, using their Converse Gmail accounts. (This is to enable one of the anti-Zoombombing measures suggested below.)

Most of the time, a free Zoom account will work fine. You will need a paid Zoom account to do any of the following:

• Hold a meeting more than 40 minutes long
• Hold a meeting with more than 100 users
• Record your meeting to the cloud (recording to your own hard drive works with a free account)

Converse has 14 licenses for paid accounts. (The licenses are tied to people; they don't float.) Email Campus Technology (helpdesk@converse.edu) if you have a case that you should be one of the 14.

Putting a Zoom meeting in Moodle

Common steps

First, schedule the meeting, following Zoom's instructions. Things to be sure you include:

• Under Meeting ID, make sure Generate Automatically is selected.
• If your class isn't too big, enable the waiting room: under Meeting Options (Advanced Options in the app), check Enable waiting room.
  • Not every version of the Zoom app offers this option. If yours doesn't, try scheduling through a Web browser, which does offer this.
  • If the Only authenticated users can join option is present, check that too, so you have a little more confidence that the people in your waiting room actually are who they claim to be.
    • In some versions of the app, this option is labeled Allow Join Meeting, and the setting you want is Only Authenticated Users Can Join.
  The waiting room may be enough for small classes, because the only people who can get in to your meeting will be those you admit.
• If your class is big enough that admitting students one by one from the waiting room is too slow, use a meeting password: under Meeting Password, check Require meeting password.

Adding your meeting to Google Calendar

1. At the end of the Common steps above, choose Google Calendar as your calendar. This will leave you looking at the event in your Google Calendar.
2. In a Web browser (use another tab if your Google calendar is open in a Web browser), go to your course page in Moodle. Turn editing on.
3. In the appropriate place in the course, create a URL resource.
4. In the External URL blank, paste the URL from the location blank in the Google Calendar event. (The same URL is down in the event's description, right by Join Zoom Meeting.) Don't save the resource just yet.
5. Copy the Google calendar event's description, and paste that information into the URL's Description blank.
6. Check the box that says Display description on course page.
7. Scroll down and click Save and return to course.

Scheduling without Google Calendar

1. At the end of the Common steps above, choose Other as your calendar. This will leave you looking at a calendar invite, with the option to copy it to your clipboard. Copy it.
2. In a Web browser (use another tab if you were using your Web browser for Zoom), go to your course page in Moodle. Turn editing on.
3. In the appropriate place in the course, create a URL resource.
4. In the Description blank, paste the invite you copied from the Zoom window.
5. Edit out anything you don't want. Make sure you don't edit out the meeting password!
6. Change the dropdown immediately below the Description blank from HTML format to Plain text format. This keeps the description from being all mashed up together on your course page.
7. Copy the meeting URL (found just below Join Zoom Meeting) and paste it into the External URL blank. Be sure you get the entire URL. It starts with https:// and runs all the way to the next blank line, so it may be spread over two lines at least in the Description blank.
8. Check the box that says Display description on course page.
9. Scroll down and click Save and return to course.

Anti-Zoombombing once the meeting starts

• Keep control of the screen. Use your host controls to limit screen sharing, so no one can share a screen without your permission.
• You can summarily kick people out. Again using the host controls, you can throw someone out of the meeting, and that person will not be able to rejoin with the same Zoom account.