Use Zoom for online office hours
To hold online office hours using Zoom, you will want to do two things:
- Schedule recurring meetings
- Turn on the Zoom Waiting Room
Note: To maintain student privacy, do not record office hour meetings.
1. Schedule a recurring meeting
Follow the steps in this Zoom guide to schedule a recurring meeting during your appointed office hours.
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.
2. Turn on the Waiting Room
The Zoom Waiting Room feature allows you to control when a participant joins the meeting. With Waiting Room, you can admit attendees one by one or hold all attendees in the Waiting Room and admit them all at once. You can send all participants to the Waiting Room when joining your meeting or only guests, participants who are not on your Zoom account or are not logged in. The Waiting Room needs to be enabled first in your Settings, then turned on when scheduling (or during) an individual meeting.
First, turn on the Waiting Room feature in your user settings:
- Go to https://ewu.zoom.us/signin to sign into your Zoom account online.
- In the left sidebar, click Settings and then click In Meeting (Advanced).
- Scroll down to find Waiting Room. Toggle the switch to turn on the Waiting Room.The Waiting Room is now enabled for your meetings.
Then, to turn on the Waiting Room feature for an individual meeting, do either of the following:
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:
- At the bottom of the Zoom window, click the Participants button.
- At the bottom-right corner of the window, click the drop down menu titled More.
- Click Put Participants in Waiting Room on Entry to enable it. If there is a check mark next to it in 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
- Hover your cursor over their name in the Participant list.
- Click More >.
- 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.
If you need any further assistance please view our Service Catalog for other Knowledge Base articles or contact the IT Help Desk via Phone: 509.359.2247 or Email: helpdesk@ewu.edu