Dr. Iro Ntonia, Senior Teaching Fellow in the EDU, used Zoom to design and facilitate a Master’s project review session

Please note that Zoom is not supported by all Faculty EdTech teams and ICT. Therefore, it is imperative that before you use it for teaching purposes you discuss your requirements with your Faculty EdTech team.

• Set up a 1.5 hrs meeting a week in advance and pre-selected options to stop participants (other than the meeting hosts) from sharing their screen. The link to the Zoom meeting is generated automatically on set up, so I copied and pasted this in the 'joining instructions' email sent to students a couple of days before the session.
• Students were asked to watch a pre-recorded short lecture ahead of joining the Zoom discussion. In that lecture, I included three key points for discussion to help steer the real-time Zoom conversation. I had also asked students to use the ‘raise hand’ function when they wanted to contribute to the discussion.
• One thing I didn’t do, but have since been keen on trying, is to set up the meeting so that meeting hosts can ‘admit’ participants to the meeting rather than anyone with the meeting link being able to join at any time. Having the host admit participants gives more control over the discussion and can act as an extra gatekeeping layer.
• During discussion: the ‘raise hand’ function was invaluable as it allowed me to manage and facilitate contributions in much the same way as I would have done had it been in a face-to-face environment. I had opted to not record the webinar as the nature of the session itself was not conducive to this (Master’s project progress-review tutorial format). I was able to share my screen and talk through slides during the webinar with no issues.