What’s New with Zoom?

October 26, 2020

Zoom: The Year So Far

The sudden shift to online instruction in the Spring brought about a host of challenges from learning to teach virtually to creating and proctoring exams. Over the past six months, faculty and staff have used Zoom to its fullest potential hosting more than 285,000 meetings. These meetings have had over 2.7 million participants attend from countries all over the world, including Germany, Costa Rica, India and many more. Clemson has also hosted over 250 webinars to assist incoming or prospective students, provide important updates to faculty and staff, and to continue the Land Grant Extension offerings to people across the country.

Zoom Archiving

One of the primary benefits of Zoom is the ability to easily record to the cloud and distribute the subsequent recording to students. The rapid adoption of Zoom by our faculty and staff has led to hundreds of thousands of recordings being stored in the cloud. This has pushed storage capacity to a limit and an archiving plan has now been put into place to address potential storage issues.

Zoom recordings stored in the cloud will now be removed at a rolling 180-day, or 6-month, mark. This timeline was selected to allow instructors to focus on their course content and students during the semester as recordings will stay in the cloud up to 2 months after the semester has ended. Future recordings can be automatically copied into an instructor’s Ensemble account as well. This feature can be requested and enabled by contacting ITHelp@clemson.edu. Previous recordings can be manually transferred by accessing them through https://clemson.zoom.us, and downloading the appropriate files through the “Recordings” tab.

Zoom Updates

The Zoom client is continuing to evolve with exciting new features now available! The most recent version can be downloaded here: https://zoom.us/download. Some of the more interesting features are:

The popular virtual background capability has been expanded to support a host of older computer models.
Users can now enable “join before host” with a set time limit. When scheduling a meeting, participants can be allowed to join either 5, 10, or 15 minutes before the meeting start time. This can help promote casual student interaction before class time between themselves or with the instructor.
Self-sign-up breakout rooms are now available! When enabling breakout rooms in a meeting, hosts can now allow participants to pick which room they wish to join. Please make sure all participants are on the most recent client to access this option.

A full list of updates can always be found here: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/sections/360008531112-Zoom-Releases-By-Product