Sometimes we're lucky enough to get a little more than we paid for, and that's the case here. CAE was just notified by Zoom that our license received a free upgrade, and two really good things happened:
- Students/Faculty/Staff can now host an unlimited number of meetings with up to 100 participants. You may recall when we first obtained our license, we were limited to 50 participants in a meeting. That has doubled now!
- We currently have one "Webinar 500" license and one "Large Meeting 200" license that we can assign to individual users who need to host really large events. Our "Large Meeting" license was just upgraded from 200 to a maximum of 500 participants. The presenter interface for Webinars in Zoom is a little different that for Meetings (and we've found most of our users are more familiar with Meetings). Now, you have the option of requesting use of the "Large Meeting 500" license for really large events if you'd prefer the more familiar Meeting interface over that of the Webinar. Options are good! To request the use of either license in advance of your event, just email Greg Simmons at simmonsgc@appstate.edu.
Remember that all faculty, staff, and students have a Zoom Pro license as part of our site license. Just go to http://appstate.zoom.us and log in to claim your Pro license. Use the Downloads page to grab the mobile or iPad apps to use Zoom on-the-go. The mobile apps work great, both for hosting or participating!
The move to Zoom Cloud Meetings from the old Blackboard Collaborate Webconferencing has been quite successful. From 778 users at the end of October 2016, we now have 2000 users as of July 2017 - a 157% increase! Zoom is being used by faculty/staff/students for synchronous class meetings in fully online courses, to bring in external guests to interact with F2F or online class meetings, for online office hours by faculty, for virtual interviews of job candidates, for meetings by students undertaking small group projects for class, for connecting with friends and family, for organizations hosting "virtual conferences," and more!
Zoom also is playing a role in achieving some of our university's common goals, such as making local to global connections and global learning. In April of 2017, members of the Appalachian community connected via Zoom with users in these 10 countries (these are just the Top Ten):
Curious about Zoom? Watch a 38 minute App State Zoom Training Session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEGS5SchK6k
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