Here are a number of tips for best practices in settings up a Zoom deployment in your institution for online education.


An inefficient solution is asking all your teachers to get a Zoom account on their own. Asides the hassle of each teacher getting their own account, organizing the Zoom setup in the LMS is a nightmare. 


Here are setup ideas to make your life as an admin as easy as possible: Its as simple as 1,2,3 (and a little 4+):


1) Get 1 Zoom Pro account or higher. It is cost effective ( see https://zoom.us/pricing ) and has user management capabilities that will save you a huge headache.

2) Create all your teacher's accounts from within your Pro account. We will see below how to create users automatically as well as manually and see the Zoom pricing options.

You will see that you can even create free accounts for everyone. It is only for the master account where you need 1 Pro account as the Zoom Basic Free account does not allow managing other users from within the account.

3) Get a CirQlive MEETS integration platform to seamlessly connect your LMS with your Zoom accounts, enabling scheduling, joining sessions, organizing the recordings and attendance, scheduling private meetings, setting up reminders and more.

For more information, please contact sales@cirqlive.com.

4) Connect your MEETS integration platform within minutes to your LMS via LTI, and on the other node connect MEETS to your Zoom admin account using  special Zoom Keys you have available in your account. So did we say its a 15 minute process including a cup of coffee?


All your teachers and student need to do is to go to the course page in the LMS and use Zoom. Its that easy.


Zoom Account creation:

1) You have 2 methods to create accounts for your teachers. You can either manually create accounts from within the user section of your Zoom Pro account, or have the CirQlive MEETS integration automatically create Zoom accounts for your teachers. If you choose the latter, then even if a teacher does not have a Zoom account, when they enter the LMS integration platform for the first time, the Zoom account will be automatically created for them. 

If you create the accounts manually, be sure to give the teacher's Zoom account the same email as they have in the LMS.

2) You can choose to create Zoom Pro accounts or Zoom Basic  free accounts.

Zoom Basic is free and you can create unlimited amounts of free accounts for all you staff. 

Its limitations are that it has a time limit of 40 minutes for a meeting if there are over 2 people in the meeting, and has local but not cloud recording (and hence the recordings cannot automatically show up in the LMS integration).

If you have users that need this, get a Pro account or higher. You can mix and match.

You can also configure the auto account creation to automatically create Basic accounts and then later you can manually up some to Pro. 

3) Wait, what if a teacher already created their own Zoom account?

- If they created a Zoom account with their LMS email on their own, they will need to associate their account with your main Pro account for it to work in your integration. Its really simple. Create an account for them in your Zoom account with the LMS email. They will get an email asking them to approve moving their Zoom account to be part of yours. That's it. Done.  


Recording and storage management:

Zoom Pro accounts offer cloud storage streamlining having the recordings automatically show up in the LMS integration. ( As above, Zoom Basic has local but not cloud recording and hence the recordings cannot automatically show up in the LMS integration).

The Pro accounts offer 1 GB of cloud storage which is good approx. for a few hours of recording.

If you need more storage space, you can either purchase storage plans by Zoom starting at $40 a month for 100 GB, or use the CirQlive MEETS Recording management system that can automatically pull your recordings from Zoom and move them to cost effective platforms like Amazon S3.


Summary? 

We are here to help you get your online education platform utilizing Zoom up and running in under 20 minutes, in an organized, manageable and streamlined manner.

Feel free to contact us as sales@cirqlive.com for more information or visit our CirQlive site for integrating web conferencing platforms with LMSs.