Dear Colleagues, 

Since the issue described below has come up a couple of times already on our first day of classes, I thought I’d pass on a suggestion about zoom waiting rooms.

While it’s a good idea to enable the waiting room function for your class zoom room—so that you can ‘let everyone in’ at the same time—the function can cause difficulties for students who are late joining the class, which can often happen if they are having technical difficulties etc. (The problem also occurs if a student is disconnected from the meeting and would like to rejoin.) The trouble is that it’s hard to monitor the waiting room once you’ve started lecturing, and so students can be left out of the class with no way to join in.

The solution is to disable the waiting room once you start the lecture. This allows late coming students as well as those disconnected and hoping to reconnect to join the call without disturbing you. The instructions to do this are at this link (you may need to click on your relevant operating system, likely at the link that says “Windows | MacOs”. And for extra convenience, here is a picture of the instructions:

Zoom Waiting Rooms

 

It’s literally a two-second task, and it can make things significantly easier from a technical standpoint for our remote students, so I hope you’ll consider this.

(Alternatively, you don’t actually need to enable the waiting room in the first place, although doing so makes it a bit easier to start the class.)

Thanks very much,

Christopher Essert