When Fairfield University and other colleges moved to remote teaching in Spring 2020, some instructors had the experience of non-students managing to intrude on live Zoom meetings. These disruptive incidents, which often include injecting offensive material into the session, can quickly derail a class and undermine the teaching and learning that is taking place. To help prevent such intrusions in your classes, here are some steps you can take to effectively secure your Zoom sessions.

Lock your virtual classroom

Did you know you can lock a Zoom session that’s already started, so that no one else can join? It’s kind of like closing the classroom door after the bell. Give students a few minutes to file in and then click Participants at the bottom of your Zoom window. In the Participants pop-up, click the button that says Lock Meeting.

• How to lock your classroom

Control screen sharing

To give instructors more control over what students are seeing and to prevent them from sharing random content, Zoomrecently updated the default screen-sharing settings for their education users. Sharing privileges are now set to “Host Only,” so instructors by default are the only ones who can share content in class. If students need to share their work with the group, however, you can allow screen sharing in the host controls. Click the arrow next to Share Screen and then Advanced Sharing Options. Under “Who can share?” choose “Only Host” and close the window. You can also change the default sharing option to All Participants in your Zoom settings.

• How to manage screen sharing

Enable the Waiting Room

The Waiting Room feature is one of the best ways to protect your Zoom virtual classroom and keep out those who aren’t supposed to be there.

When enabled, you have two options for who hits the Waiting Room before entering a class:

1. All Participants will send everyone to the virtual waiting area, where you can admit them individually or all at once.

2. Guest Participants Only allows known students to skip the Waiting Room and join but sends anyone not signed in/part of your school into the virtual waiting area.

The virtual Waiting Room can be enabled for every class (in your settings) or for individual classes at the scheduling level.

• How to enable the Waiting Room

Lock down the chat

Instructors can restrict the in-class chat so students cannot privately message other students. We’d recommend controlling chat access in your in-meeting toolbar controls (rather than disabling it altogether) so students can still interact with the instructor as needed.

• How to control chat access

Remove a participant

If someone who’s not meant to be there somehow manages to join your virtual classroom, you can easily remove them from the Participants menu. Hover over their name, and the Remove option (among other options) will appear. Click to remove them from your virtual classroom, and they won’t be allowed back in.

• How to remove a participant

Security options when scheduling a class

The great thing about Zoom is that you have these and other protection options at your fingertips when scheduling a class and before you ever have to change anything in front of your students. Here are a few of the most applicable:

• Use a random meeting ID: It’s best practice to generate a random meeting ID for your class, so it can’t be shared multiple times. This is the better alternative to using your Personal Meeting ID, which is not advised because it’s basically an ongoing meeting that’s always running.

• Password-protect the classroom: Create a password and share with your students via school email so only those intended to join can access a virtual classroom.

• Disable join before host: Students cannot join class before the instructor joins and will see a pop-up that says, “The meeting is waiting for the host to join.“

• Manage annotation: Instructors should disable participant annotation in the screen sharing controls to prevent students from annotating on a shared screen and disrupting class.

• Disable video: Turn off a student’s video to block distracting content or inappropriate gestures while class is in session.

• Mute students: Mute/unmute individual students or all of them at once. Mute Upon Entry (in your settings) is also available to keep the clamor at bay when everyone files in.

• Attendee on-hold: An alternative to removing a user, you can momentarily disable their audio/video connections. Click on the attendee’s video thumbnail and select Start Attendee On-Hold to activate.

Important recommendation for instructors

The University encourages you NOT to post pictures of your virtual class on social media or elsewhere online, as posting video recordings or images from your class requires the written consent of all students.

Related Pages