Use Zoom for Online Office Hours

Owned by Bry Walters (Deactivated)
Last updated: Sept 29, 2020 by Laura Reeve
3 min read

How to hold office hours via Zoom.

Instructions

To hold online office hours using Zoom, you will want to do two things:

  1. Schedule recurring meetings

  2. Turn on the Zoom Waiting Room

Note: To maintain student privacy, do not record office hour meetings.

 Schedule a Recurring Meeting

  1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal.

  2. Click Meetings.

  3. Click Schedule a Meeting.

  4. Check Recurring Meeting.

     

  5. Edit the recurrence. This includes the number of times the meeting occurs and how often it occurs. Note: Recurring meetings can have a maximum of 50 occurrences. If you need more than 50 occurrences, you can use the No Fixed Time option.

     

  6. Click Save.

  7. Finish selecting the meeting options and click Schedule.

Following these steps will allow you to use a single link and meeting ID across all of your office hours sessions, making it easier to share the same set of instructions with students across multiple events, and making it more likely that students will find their way to online office hours.

For more support, visit the Zoom guide to schedule a recurring meeting. 

Turn on the Waiting Room

When scheduling the meeting or editing meeting settings, scroll down to Meeting Option and make sure the checkbox next to Enable Waiting Room is checked.

During the meeting:

  1. At the bottom of the Zoom window, click the Participants button.

  2. At the bottom-right corner of the window, click the drop-down menu titled More.

  3. Click Put Participants in Waiting Room on Entry to enable it. If there is a check-mark next to it on the menu, it is already enabled.

When the Waiting Room is enabled, participants will see the following screen when joining the meeting:

Once you have started the meeting as the host, at the bottom of the Zoom window, click Participants to see the full list of participants in the meeting, including the list of people waiting to join the meeting in the Waiting Room.

To add a participant from the Waiting Room, hover your cursor over their name in the Participant list and click Admit.

 

To move a participant from your meeting back into the Waiting Room

  1. Hover your cursor over their name in the Participant list.

  2. Click More >.

  3. Select the menu option Put in Waiting Room.

     

For more information on how to set up, use, and customize your Waiting Room, see Zoom’s guide for Waiting Rooms.

 

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