How to Create a Zoom Learning Activity

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In LearnWorlds, you have various options for hosting live sessions and webinars; you can integrate your Zoom account into your LearnWorlds school. Once Zoom is seamlessly integrated, you can begin incorporating Zoom Learning Activities into your courses, making live Zoom sessions an integral part of your course activities.

Enrolled users can easily join Zoom meetings and webinars directly through the LearnWorlds platform without the necessity of downloading or installing the Zoom client.

This article will explain the distinctions between Zoom meetings and webinars, guide you through the process of creating and setting up Zoom activities, and provide tips on managing your live Zoom sessions.

Zoom Meetings vs. Webinars

To be able to exploit Zoom Meetings and Webinars learning activities, you will need:

• One or more free or paid Zoom Accounts (Free Zoom account has several limitations, e.g., 40 minutes per meeting)
• One or more Zoom Webinar Add-ons for your Zoom accounts.

Zoom Meetings are designed for interactive small group sessions, whereas Zoom Webinars are better suited for larger lecture-style events featuring Q&A, and where not all participants are required to have their cameras on. You can explore further distinctions between Zoom Meetings and Webinars to choose the most appropriate option for your school's needs, here.

Create a Zoom Learning Activity

Once you integrate Zoom with your LearnWorlds school, you can add a Zoom Meeting or a Zoom Webinar activity to your course, by navigating to your course contents and clicking on Add activity.  

1. Choose the Live session category and select whether you want to create a Zoom Webinar or a Zoom Meeting learning activity.

2. Click on Save or Save & Edit to edit the activity immediately.

The Zoom learning activities are scheduled according to the time zone you have set up in your school via Settings → School Info. Zoom will adjust the time and convert it accordingly to the time zone each user has set up in their personal Zoom account.

Set up a Zoom Meeting/Webinar within LearnWorlds

An admin or course author can set up most of the common functionality provided by Zoom Webinars or Zoom meetings, including:

• Course Player Details
• Zoom Account: If you have connected to more than one Zoom account (available in our Learning Center plan or higher), you will also be able to select the preferred one for the specific activity under the "Zoom Account" option. You can also assign an instructor’s Zoom account.
• Zoom Topic 
• Zoom Description
• When (Date/Time)
• Duration 
• Reminder emails: You can inform the enrolled users of the upcoming sessions using email reminders.
• Recurring meeting: Your meeting can be scheduled as recurring on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can schedule up to 20 occurrences within that learning activity, so after the 20 occurrences, the dates will be greyed out in the relevant field. Activate the Recurring meeting option and set up the following: 

• RECURRENCE (monthly, weekly, daily)
• REPEAT EVERY
• OCCURS ON (for monthly and weekly → choose the day of the month/week that this meeting will occur)
• END DATE (by date or by occurrences or after a number of occurrences)

The new learning activities for each occurrence will be created automatically in your course content.

If you update the occurrences of a recurring meeting within your Zoom account, such changes will not impact the corresponding occurrences in LearnWorlds, thus potentially leading to complications with your Zoom meetings. If you want to remove specific instances of recurring meetings, you can delete them from the LearnWorlds course contents.

• Auto recording: You can enable local or cloud recording automatically when the meeting starts. At the end of the recording, the meeting will be saved either on your local device or in the Zoom Cloud. You can find more information in this article. 
• Replay video: A Replay recording video will become available to your users once the meeting has ended.  You can choose to provide an External URL of a live session recording or offer the recording of the specific meeting that can be made automatically available to the users only if it is saved in the ZOOM Cloud. You can find more information in this article. 
• Password: The Password setting is at least a must-have property for K12 education students. Although your students will not need the password for connecting to your meeting/webinar through your school, that will prevent anyone with your Zoom link from joining your meetings.
• Show "Join Url": To overcome connection or browser compatibility issues, we have also made available a setting named “Join Url”, which makes the URL of the Zoom meeting/webinar visible, allowing students to join the live session through their native Zoom client (instead of watching it inside the LearnWorlds environment). The related URL appears on the course player screen before a student joins the meeting and next to the Zoom web client.

  

• Options:

• Start video when host joins meeting.
• Allow participants to join the meeting before the host starts the meeting (available for Zoom Meetings only).
• Mute participants upon entry (available for Zoom Meetings only).
• Enable waiting Room. If the waiting room is disabled on your Zoom Account, it should also be set to Disabled in your Zoom activity setup.
• Default to HD video (available for Zoom Webinars only).
• Enable Q&A (available for Zoom Webinars only).

- If you enable the "Join before host" setting, make sure that you have set up a meeting passcode. This will prevent any potential issues that may arise when attempting to join the meeting. 

Set Up Your Zoom Account Settings

1. As per the security guidelines, Zoom requires that all meetings are secured with one of the following security options: 

• Meeting Passcode
• Waiting Room
• Only authenticated users can join meetings from Web Client

You should enable one of the first two options (Meeting Passcode or Waiting Room); otherwise, Zoom will secure all meetings in the Waiting Room by default, and whatever your settings are in the LearnWorlds Zoom learning activity will be overridden by the settings in your Zoom account. 

2. In your Zoom account Settings, the options Use Personal Meeting ID (PMI) when scheduling a meeting and Only authenticated meeting participants and webinar attendees can join meetings and webinars, need to be disabled to avoid any issues.

If you have already created live sessions and you had the PMI setting enabled by accident, as soon as you disable it, you will need to re-create your live sessions in your course.

Start and Manage Live Sessions

All the upcoming and previous live sessions are accessible under the Live Sessions administration page, where you can review & edit all the scheduled live sessions in a simple and clear calendar view.

On the Live sessions page, it is feasible to start your live sessions. When the admin starts the session (via LearnWorlds or Zoom account), the Zoom Desktop/Mobile client will open up, and the admin will become the Host of the Zoom session.

You can similarly start a Zoom Meeting/Webinar through the Courses menu. Visit the Course that includes the Zoom activity, hover over the Zoom learning activity itself, and click on Settings. In the panel that will pop up, click on Start Meeting.

Notes:

• The instructors/admins can only start/join the meeting from their Zoom Account  (Zoom client). They cannot join the session from the course player.
• The users who join from the course player do not have access to the Gallery view.
• The users who join with the Join URL have access to Gallery view like a usual Zoom meeting.

User Experience

Access to the live session will be available only once the Live session has been started otherwise, users will get the message "The Live Session is not ready yet. Please wait for the host to start this session".

Once the instructor/school admin starts the session, the students, using desktop devices, can join the meeting/webinar without leaving the LearnWorlds course player. The last step is to click on Join Live Session.

If they check the activity from a mobile browser or the mobile app, they should join through the Zoom app.

Allow Users to Add Zoom Live Sessions to their Calendar 

LearnWorlds also supports the Add to Calendar option so users can add the live sessions to their Calendar.

You need to add an Events Calendar Widget/Section to your school's pages and enable the Add to Calendar option, as shown below.

Then users can visit the Events Calendar Widget/Section, click on the Add to Calendar option, and choose if they want a placeholder event to be created to their Google, Apple, Outlook.com, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, or iCal File for the Live Session. 

Otherwise, users can also add the live session to their Calendar from the Course Player by visiting the Zoom learning activity and clicking on Add to Calendar, which appears in the Course Player by default. 

In the chosen calendar, the Zoom event title (name of learning activity), the date & time, and the direct Zoom link (not the learning activity) will be displayed so users can access it directly in the Zoom environment.

If you wish to hide the Add to Calendar option from the course player within the Zoom Activity, add the following CSS code under <style> (css) for built in pages (i.e social, profile, workpad, my account) in the Site Builder → Custom code. 

/* LW Dev CSS hide add to calendar from zoom webinar */
.zoom-info__completed div { display: none; }
.zoom-info__box .center div { display: none; }
/* End of LW Dev CSS hide add to calendar from zoom webinar */

Delete Zoom Meetings/Webinars

You can delete a Zoom Meeting/Webinar in two ways: 

• Delete the Zoom Meeting/Webinar learning activity of a course
• Delete a Zoom Meeting/Webinar from the Live Sessions page

When you delete a live Zoom session from the Live Sessions page, the course learning activity that includes the Zoom meeting/webinar will not be removed and can be used to initiate a new live session. Also, if you delete a Zoom webinar/activity either from the Live sessions page or by deleting a webinar/meeting course activity, the meeting/webinar will NOT be deleted from your Zoom account (you can always delete it from within your Zoom account).

Track User Progress/Attendance

You can easily track the user progress/attendance of your Zoom Learning activities and even manually mark the live session as completed. You will find more information in this article.

When a user joins the Zoom meeting via their calendar link and not within the Course Player or the Zoom URL link, then the Zoom meeting won't be automatically marked as completed. However, the admin afterward can manually mark the Zoom learning activity as completed for the users