Content Delivery

Create a Zoom Pro account (https://ucdavis.zoom.us/)

• All College of Letters and Science instructors, TAs, and Readers can visit https://ucdavis.zoom.us/ and log in with UC Davis credentials to create a Zoom Pro account. Contact L&S IT if you run into problems (https://lsit.ucdavis.edu/).

• These accounts ordinarily have a limit of 300 participants. Let the IT people know if you are teaching a course of >300 students, and they will get you a different license with a larger cap

Schedule your course meeting times as Zoom meetings through Canvas. We strongly recommend that you use this method for scheduling (rather than scheduling directly in Zoom) so that the meeting shows up in Canvas for your students.

• 1. • In Canvas, go to Zoom and click Schedule a New Meeting

       • Recommended settings

     • The duration must be a multiple of 15 minutes. If you are teaching, a 50-minute class, you should schedule it for 60 minutes but tell your students that it will end after 50 minutes.

     • Add your TAs as Alternative Hosts so that they can start the lecture if you are not available. You can also change them to co-host during the meeting. Then they can manage breakout rooms, take care of administrative duties such as muting/unmuting, and recording.

     • Students will be able to join the meeting by clicking the Zoom tool in Canvas. You should also provide them with the Zoom link through additional means (e.g., Announcements). The meetings should also be available to the students via the Canvas Calendar.

Settings

• Select that your video will be visible, but video from the other participants will not (except in small classes)

• Set to record the presentation in the cloud. See the section later on this page on Real-Time Lecture Recordings for more details.

  • We strongly recommend that you share the recording for students to review or for students who are unable to attend the synchronous class (e.g., due to connectivity problems, which will be common). See the section on Lecture Recordings for details.

• Set to mute the audio for all participants upon entry

• It really helps to have two monitors

  • Run the Zoom meeting from the screen that you will use for Presenter Tools

  • Before you start the PowerPoint presentation, make sure the window with the presentation is not on the screen you will use for presenter tools. Then share this window from Zoom, and then start your presentation.

Create a "fake student" account so that you can see what things look like from the student perspective

• Use this account to see what your Zoom meetings and other materials will look like from a smartphone (using the Canvas Student app)

Getting Started Guide (created by Stanford)

It takes longer to effectively deliver material over Zoom. You will likely find that you are not able to move through the same amount of material in each lecture.

If your home Internet service has limited or unpredictable bandwidth, we currently recommend that you run Zoom from on campus if you feel comfortable doing so. We have verified that this is consistent with both the county and state shelter-in-place policies. If you do not have an office on campus, you may be able to request a space for giving your Zoom meetings (or may be able to do this from the classroom assigned for your course).

• Disconnect from the LS IT VPN or any other VPN before starting your meeting. A VPN will slow things down further in many cases.

• If you must run Zoom from home, you can ask other residents of the household to minimize their Internet usage while you are teaching (especially activities that require extensive uploading, such as videoconferencing)

• If you find that your Internet connection is unstable, try pausing your video and just delivering screen share and audio content (or, if necessary, just the audio)

• As an emergency fallback, calling into the meeting from a phone line can allow you to continue a class.

Have a TA (or undergraduate learning assistant) on Zoom to help moderate. Set expectations

• Make them a co-host.

• Have their video visible so that they can be your audience and can visibly get your attention.

• Set Chat to 'host only' (chatting to everyone and privately is very distracting) and ask students to chat any questions to the TA

• You can have them visually or verbally interrupt you if they need to tell you something (e.g., "A student just asked an interesting question ...")

If you ordinarily use PowerPoint or related software to present images during your lecture, you can use screen sharing to accomplish this in Zoom

• They will also be able to see you through your webcam on a small floating palette while you are sharing your screen

• Considering plugging into an additional monitor so you can configure PPT to display the presentation to the students and your notes/upcoming slides to you

• Unless you will be frequently switching between different applications or windows, share only your presentation window rather than your whole desktop (so that students won't see calendar alerts, incoming emails, other apps, etc.)

If you are sharing something with audio (e.g., a video clip embedded into PowerPoint, a web browser with a YouTube video), check the boxes for Share computer sound and Optimize for full-screen video clip when you share the screen.

There are several options that are analogous to writing on a chalkboard/whiteboard

• Zoom has a whiteboard that you can ‘sketch’ on

  • 1. • This works very well if you use an iPad and Apple Pencil for doing the drawing. Learn more

• You can use an actual whiteboard that the students can see through your webcam (but test this first to make sure it’s actually visible)

• If you have a drawing tablet (e.g., Wacom) and appropriate software, you can draw using your computer and share the screen on Zoom

  • 1. • OpenBoard is a powerful whiteboard application that you can use for this purpose with a drawing tablet

• You can use your smart phone as a document camera

  • You will need a charging cable and a way to suspend your phone over your desk - on a stack of books or with an arm. Learn more

We strongly recommend that you include frequent interactive activities in your Zoom lectures. This is a good idea with traditional in-person lectures, but it is even more important in remote lectures. However, keep in mind that many of our students do not have computers and/or home Internet connections and will be using Canvas and Zoom through smartphones (which will make it difficult for them to interact in real time).

Student questions

• For large classes: Students use the chat tool to submit questions or answers to questions.

  • Have a moderator TA (or undergraduate learning assistant) present to alert you to questions or raised hands (make them a co-host)

• For small classes: Students can unmute their microphones if they want to speak.

Multiple choice comprehension questions

• The simplest solution is just to ask a yes-no question (preferably on a slide) and have them respond using Zoom yes/no participant response feature.

• iClicker cloud + REEF (the campus standard adoption) allows students to respond to live questions from their phones or other devices.
  Questions can be written on slides and embedded in a ppt presentation. If you have already been using iClicker, it will be easy to continue. Learn more

  1. 1. • • be sure that you are not using the geo-fence under attendance (helpful when you only want to get responses from the students who are actually present in a lecture hall)

          • you do not need a clicker base

• Zoom also has a built-in polling tool; Learn more

  1. 1. • • Questions need to be written before the lecture begins.

• You can set up a GoogleForm to gather live responses to questions / polls

Breakout Rooms - small discussions

• If there are fewer than 200 students synchronously joined, use breakout groups for “pair and share” – give a discussion questions, Zoom can automatically split participants into small groups (3 or 4) and then bring them back to the whole group

  • You can have Zoom randomly assign students to groups or you can preassign students to breakout groups. Students must have Zoom accounts for you to preassign them. This is set up when you schedule the meeting.

  • The maximum number of simultaneous breakout groups is 50, and the maximum number of participants across all breakout rooms is 200. Learn more

  • Give very clear instructions about what the students are expected to accomplish in the small group.

  • You can visit the groups. You can send a text message to the groups. When you end the groups, they have a warning to finish their work (you can edit this down to ~30 seconds)

  • Students can share screens in breakout rooms. Students can chat to each other.

  • The students are getting quite burnt out on the breakout rooms. Be sure to use them with specific goals.

Student Screen Sharing

• By default, students will be able to share their screens or other content with the whole class (but only when you are not sharing your screen). This could be useful in smaller classes. However, if they do this when you don’t want them to, you can disable the ability of other participants to share during a session by hovering your mouse over the bottom of the Zoom video window to reveal the Zoom menu bar, clicking on the little upward-pointing arrow next to Share, and selecting Advanced Sharing Options.

• For smaller classes, you can have the students write simultaneously on a Google doc

Please do not require attendance to synchronous lectures.

There will be legitimate technical issues as well as scheduling issues.

Encourage attendance by giving points for participation

• • Instruct students to use their actual names, login names, or Student IDs for their ZOOM account profile. The host/co-host can generate a list of attendees.

  • use iClicker REEF or Zoom polling to ask comprehension questions - give credit for participation, not for correct answers

  • ensure that students can also earn participation points in other ways (see suggestions of low-stakes assignments)

  • allow 'skip days' - e.g. attending 14 out of 20 lectures earns all of the attendance points

Exerting more control during live lecture (use sparingly, if at all)

• • Attention tracking – a feature in Zoom that indicates if a participant has the viewer not active or open for 30 seconds (not recommended).

  • Please don't make your students go into a locked full screen for normal live lecture.

We very very strongly recommend that you record your Zoom lectures. Many students will have genuine technical problems that prevent them from attending in real time.

• • • You can record either “in the cloud” (strongly recommended) or on your computer

      • When you schedule the meeting, indicate that you want it to record automatically (so you don't forget to start the recording at the beginning of class)

      • We recommend recording to the cloud because the recording will continue even if you have a connectivity problem

    • You will receive an email from Zoom when the recording becomes available (usually within an hour of the end of a meeting)

    • Once it is available to you, you need to publish it so that it is available to the students. There are two approaches:

      • Option 1 (recommended for most instructors): Share the video using the Zoom tool in Canvas.

        • Once you have received the email indicating that the recording is available, go to the Zoom tool on Canvas, click the Cloud Recordings tab, and "slide" the Publish button for the recording.

        • The downside of this approach is that the students could potentially share the URL to the recording on social media, and anyone in the world would be able to see the recording. At a minimum, this raises privacy concerns for the students.

        • To address this problem, you should add a password to the videos, which can be set up in advance for future classes and added after the fact for prior classes (click here for instructions). You should also follow our previous advice about informing students that posting links would be a serious violation of the Code of Academic Conduct.

      • Option 2: Download the recording, upload it to AggieVideo, and make it available to students on Canvas using the Media Gallery. See detailed instructions here.

        • The advantage of this approach is that there is no URL for students to post online, making the recordings more secure.

        • The disadvantages are that (a) it will take you ~10 minutes to do this following each class period, and (b) the automatically generated closed captioning will no longer be available.

      • For most instructors, we currently thing that Option 1 is a better tradeoff, but some instructors may prefer Option 2.

See the Shared Materials page for materials you can import into Canvas to train your students to download and properly use Zoom. These materials provide a more detailed explanation of the following recommendations.

To see options for getting free Internet service, students can go to: https://keepteaching.ucdavis.edu/need-wi-fi. Students on financial aid should have already received an email indicating how they can apply for a free loaner laptop (although this probably applies only to students who are living in the Davis area).

Students can get a Basic Zoom license account managed by UC Davis for free. They can do this by going to https://ucdavis.zoom.us/, clicking Sign In (not Sign Up), and then entering their UC Davis email address (including the @ucdavis.edu) and their UC Davis password. This will use their campus credentials and automatically populate their name from the campus directory.

• • It is possible for students to use Zoom without an account, but an account may be helpful (or even necessary) to avoid "zoom bombing"

  • An account may also help you take attendance, create breakout groups, etc.

  • Students should be instructed (or even required) to use their official UC Davis names as their Zoom names. We have verified that this is not a privacy issue as long as you use the official UCD password-protected methods to share any recordings of the meetings (the Zoom tool on Canvas for in-the-cloud recordings and Aggie Video [accessed on Canvas via the Media Gallery tool] for on-your-computer recordings)

Tell students that they need to download Zoom well in advance (recommendation: at least one day prior to the first online class meeting).

• Once they download Zoom, they should test it at https://zoom.us/test

To access a class in real time from Canvas, they can go to the Zoom tool, and click on the link to the meeting in the Upcoming Meetings tab.

• They should try to join 3-5 minutes before the actual start of the meeting

• They should join using Computer audio (if using a computer) or Internet Audio (if using a tablet or smartphone)

• They should mute their microphone (but this should be automatic if you've set up the meeting that way)

• If they have trouble with the audio, they can try connecting to the audio via telephone and seeing the video on their computer/tablet/smartphone.

• If they can’t get Zoom to work at all, they can just call in to the audio via telephone (make your slides available on Canvas in advance so that they can follow along).

  • They can see the phone number and access code by clicking the Invitation button for the meeting.

To access the recording of a previous class meeting from Canvas, they can go to the Zoom tool, click on the Cloud Recordings tab, and click on the link to that meeting (or use the Media Gallery tool in Canvas if you've uploaded the recording to AggieVideo).

• Close everything else you were working on and, if possible set your computer to “Do Not Disturb” - just in case you share more of your screen than you intended. Alternatively, try an app like Muzzle https://muzzleapp.com/ which does this for you.

• Your computer camera and microphone are probably sufficient, but you should have a headset/earbuds available if you need them.

  • If there is a chance that there is any background noise (e.g., children, pets, street noise, very clunky heating or cooling systems), a headset with microphone is suggested. Depending on folks’ connections and their computers, seemingly subtle background noise can swamp out speaking. If you use earbuds with a built-in mic, you’ll need to make sure that the mic is close to your mouth and that you don’t create noise by touching the cables. You might also consider buying an inexpensive USB mic on Amazon for <$25.

• Make your lecture notes available during the lecture (e.g., via Files on Canvas). That way, students who cannot get the Zoom video can call into the meeting on their phones and still see your slides.

• Put more text on your slides – if there are slow internet connections, the audio may not be clear and consistent.

• Start each lecture by asking whether students are able to see and hear (use Zoom feedback options) and reminding them what to do if they have a technical problem. End each lecture with a poll asking students how well things went

• A transcript of the chat for a given meeting is saved on your computer. You can use this to review the questions that students asked, assess participation, etc.

• In large groups, don’t enable ‘play a sound when participants join or leave’

• If a minor problem occurs (e.g., child entering room), treat it as amusing rather than catastrophic

• Accessibility

  • • • Zoom includes a tool that allows you to have someone (e.g., a TA) type closed captions in real time as you lecture. This is probably unrealistic unless you have someone with experience.

      • Zoom can also connect to a 3rd-party closed captioning service. We are waiting to hear if the SDC will make this available to us.

      • The recording should automatically contain closed captioning (generated imperfectly by a computer). This is probably the best bet for most cases. It may not appear for several hours after the recording becomes available.

• Keep in mind that some of your students may be in a very different time zone

• Don’t make anything due during Week 1

• If you are sharing something with audio (e.g., a video clip embedded into PowerPoint, a web browser with a YouTube video), check the boxes for Share computer sound and Optimize for full-screen video clip when you share the screen.

• Be prepared in case you have zoom bombers or disruptive students. Click here for recommendations and print out page 2 of this PDF so it is easily accessible during your first few class periods.

  • • • Make sure the students understand what kind of behavior is appropriate (e.g., by including a Zoom Etiquette Guide).

Students access the textbook through the Bookshelf tool on Canvas. This should already be available in your Canvas site. If you don't see your textbook there, contact the bookstore for help.

Starting in Fall 2020, UC Davis is introducing Equitable Access. For a flat fee, students receive all of their required books. The bookstore is shipping print books and readers.

This should really change the way you think about assigning required resources.

• In the past: "I chose a less good book because it was less expensive"

  • Now: Choose the book the is the best resource for your students.

• In the past: "I list resources as 'recommended' to save the student's money"

  • Now: There is no need to make anything recommended. If it is a useful resource, then require it and all students will have it for that same flat fee. If you list it as recommended, only the students who can afford the additional cost will be able to access it.

Consider requiring:

• iClicker REEF app (the subscription will be included in EA)

• APA Publication Manual (digital format will be included in EA)

• APA Academic Writer (online writing support tool will be included in EA)

• Print reader of your lecture notes and handouts (Reprographics will print and the bookstore will ship included in EA)

Students need to make a decision about opting out of EA weeks before the quarter starts.

There is a chance that Zoom will completely fail or be unusable for you or for your students during one or more class meetings. It would be good to have a backup plan.

• Make sure that you have an easy way to rapidly contact all of your students using your smartphone (For example, an email listserv - Learn more)

• Build in flexibility so a technical issue on one day (on their part or on your part) will not block the students' learning goals.

  • Schedule a repeated live lecture during all meeting times of the first week and allow students to choose which to attend. (This gives you smaller groups in the first week and allows everyone time to acclimate to the technology)

• Find an alternate way to deliver this material (e.g., voice over ppt or recorded presentation) and to grant any credit due to students.

Don't simply reuse Lecture Capture from a previous quarter.

It's going to be tempting to just post last quarter's lecture capture, but don't do it. It will not engage students, create community, or establish rapport. However, there may be occasions in which it would be useful to use a small part of a Lecture Capture recording (e.g., if you had a visitor to your classroom).

• You can find your previous lecture capture videos. Log in and they will be under My Media. There are editing tools in Kaltura (you can clip off the opening and announcements, you can trim clips to just relevant content).

Voice over PowerPoint is primitive (poor quality and few editing options) but very easy way to transmit your lecture

• Slide show > Record Slide Show.

• Export as MP4

Kaltura Capture

• video.ucdavis.edu

• + Add New > Kaltura Capture

Steve’s hints for effective recorded video lectures:

• Divide each lecture into a set of short videos (5-10 minutes each). A set of ten 5-minute videos will work better than a single 50-minute video, even if the content is exactly the same. Might seem counterintuitive, but it's true.

• Talk much more rapidly than you would in a live lecture. A regular lecture-style rate of speaking is verrrry boring when viewed in a video. If you talk quickly, students can pause and rewind if they miss something.

• Ideally, the video would show your talking head in the corner along with your slides. However, this takes much more time and effort. It would be much easier to shoot a 10-30 second video of just your talking head that introduces each set of related lectures. This is easy to do, and evidence shows that students respond better if they occasionally see the lecturer.

• You can host the videos on AggieVideo, which allows you to directly link to Canvas and also makes it possible to limit access to the students in your class (which is important if you include copyrighted material).

• Consider shooting a short, informal video (2-5 minutes) each week telling the students what to expect for that week.

• There are many software packages for creating and editing lecture videos. My (and Tor’s) favorite is Screenflow. Camtasia is also good. UC-Davis provides a package called Kaltura Capture, which is integrated with AggieVideo. It’s simple, but primitive.

• Steve is happy to meet with you if you want to get serious about shooting lecture videos that you’ll use beyond the pandemic period.