Important Zoom Changes

Last week, we announced that we were moving forward with forcing passcodes on all NEW Zoom sessions since Zoom was going to force the same change at the end of the month to all existing meetings.  Once we turned this on, it started creating some unintended issues with recurring meetings and we immediately rolled the change back to allow things to continue as normal. 

After working with Zoom, they identified a bug that causes a problem with recurring meetings and in response to schools like TCU, they have retracted their plans to force this requirement at the end of the month. 

While this means that you are not required to take any action, we encourage you to review some of the security settings below.

What can you do to protect your meetings?

We still recommend that you add a passcode, turn on a waiting room, or limit your meetings to only TCU users in order to minimize Zoombombing attempts.

If you would like to address this change on any pre-existing meetings, you can do the following:

  1. Open the Zoom app and login with your TCU username and password.
  2. Click on Meetings at the top.
  3. Select the meeting that you want to update and then click Edit.
  4. Check the boxfor Passcode, Waiting Room, or Only authenticated users can join under Advanced Options(make sure to set it to Only TCU accounts) in order to add an additional level of security to your meetings. 
  5. Communicate the change to your attendees so they are prepared.

What if I created a recurring meeting for my class?

If you created a recurring Zoom meeting in TCU Online, you have a few options since the course calendar will not update in TCU Online when you modify an existing meeting:

  1. You can delete the existing recurring event and create a new one with a passcode turned on. This will update the TCU Online course calendar which many students use but we recommend that you notify your students once you do this.
  1. You can manually add a passcode using the instructions above and just communicate the passcode to each class.  They will still be able to use the link in the course calendar and will be prompted for the passcode when they join.
  1. You can go into your meeting in Zoom and turn on a waiting room or check the requirement so only authenticated users can join (make sure to set it to Only TCU accounts).  This will add an extra layer of protection to your Zoom sessions but will not require the course calendar to be updated as the students will be able to join with the existing information. 

    Note:  You will have to manually admit each student into the session if you enable the waiting room option.

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