Zoom FAQs
Get answers to the most frequently asked questions about Zoom.
CSULB faculty, staff, and students are eligible for Zoom accounts to host meetings up to 300 participants for an unlimited meeting duration.
Students can create and host meetings using their CSULB Zoom account.
TAs and/or GAs can request access to Zoom Cloud Recordings by emailing zoom@csulb.edu.
There isn’t a time limit to host Zoom meetings for CSULB faculty, staff, and students.
Users must download the Zoom desktop client for their computer and install it. To learn more, visit Getting started on Windows and MacOS.
Users must add the Zoom extension from the Chrome web store. Join the Zoom meeting by opening the app on your Chromebook and enter the Meeting ID. To learn more, visit Getting Started on Chrome OS app.
Note: Users on Chromebooks will not be able to join breakout rooms in the meeting.
Yes, Zoom can be used to provide office hours to students. Best practice is to use your Personal Meeting ID. To learn more, visit Customizing your personal meeting ID (PMI) and personal link.
We recommend viewing the Security and Privacy Considerations accordion to help keep your Zoom meetings private and secure.
Meetings are designed to be collaborative, giving the opportunity for the participants to share their screen, turn on their webcam and audio, and see other attendees.
Webinars allow the host and any designated attendee to share their screen, audio, and video. Webinars allow view-only attendees who can use the Q&A, chat, and polling question features to interact. In the webinar function, the host can unmute the attendees.
For more information, visit Meeting and Webinar Comparison.
You can schedule a meeting on the web, through the Zoom Desktop client, through the Zoom mobile app, or through one of our many integrations. To learn more, visit scheduling a Zoom meeting.
For information on how to obtain a webinar license, email zoom@csulb.edu.
The full list of Zoom settings is available online, which you can access from Single Sign-On (SSO) and clicking on the Zoom tile. Click on Settings to change your Zoom settings. You can also change Zoom settings directly from the desktop client or mobile app as well.
The Zoom desktop app will allow you to test your audio and video before hosting or joining a meeting. Click on one of the links below for more information:
The meeting ID is the meeting number associated with an instant or scheduled meeting. The meeting ID can be a 9, 10, or 11-digit number. The 9-digit number is used for instant, scheduled, or recurring meetings. The 10, or 11-digit number is used for Personal Meeting IDs. Visit the Finding an ID in Zoom page.
Zoom allows you to schedule meetings with multiple occurrences so that each occurrence uses the same meeting ID and settings. You can schedule these meetings in daily, weekly, and monthly increments. You can also set a recurring meeting to be used at any time. Meeting IDs for recurring meetings expire 365 days after the meeting was last started.
- For more info on scheduling recurring meetings, visit the recurring meetings in Zoom.
- For more info on scheduling meetings in general and all the meeting settings, see our documentation on scheduling meetings.
The Waiting Room feature allows the host to control when a participant joins the meeting. As the meeting host, you can admit attendees one by one or hold all attendees in the waiting room and admit them all at once. You can send all participants to the waiting room when joining your meeting or only guests, participants who are not on your Zoom account or are not signed in. Visit the Waiting Room overview.
To take attendance in a Zoom meeting, you can generate an attendance report after the meeting.
You can have both panelists and attendees in your webinar and manage them as the host. By clicking on Participants in your host controls, you can manage the panelists and attendees in your webinar. This includes promoting to co-host or panelist, demoting panelists to attendee, unmuting, stopping video, and more.
For more information, visit managing attendees in Zoom.
The virtual background feature allows you to display an image or video as your background during a Zoom Meeting. This feature works best with a green screen and uniform lighting, to allow Zoom to detect the difference between you and your background. Visit Virtual Background Support.
The “raise hand” feature notifies the instructor that a participant may need help or would like to answer a question. Visit Raising Hand In Webinar.
You can create breakout rooms and have the option of creating groups. You can also pre-assign students to breakout rooms prior to the meeting. Learn about managing Breakout Rooms.
Depending on your CPU, you can display up to 49 participants on a single screen of the gallery view. If more than 49 attendees are in the meeting, 49 thumbnails are displayed on each page. view up to 1,000 thumbnails by clicking the right or left arrows in gallery view to display the next 49 participants. Learn about displaying participants in the gallery view.
The polling feature for meetings allows you to create single-choice or multiple-choice polling questions for your meetings. You will be able to launch the poll during your meeting and gather the responses from your attendees. You also can download a report of polling after the meeting. Polls can also be conducted anonymously if you do not wish to collect participant information with the poll results. Visit:
You can manage participants in your meeting as the host. This includes promoting them to co-host, removing users, unmuting them, and more. Visit Managing Participants in Webinar.
Zoom allows users to quickly and conveniently transfer files via the in-meeting chat feature. From the chat window, click the “More” setting to invoke the menu and select the option to “Share file in meeting”. This is also supported in private chat. To enable this feature, visit the Zoom Settings page and enable File Transfer.
As the host, you can assign the host controls to another user and leave the meeting, enabling the participants to continue without you. This allows the meeting to continue without you, and the assigned user to have host control over the meeting. There are two ways you can do this:
- Click on Participants, hover your mouse on the name of the participant and select More, then select Make Host. Click OK.
- Click End, select Leave Meeting, then click on a name to assign a new host.
For a detailed overview, visit Pass Host Controls and Leave the Meeting.
Click Share in your meeting and choose the screen that you would like to share. Learn more about sharing your screen.
First, you must enable simultaneous screen sharing as the meeting host. Start by starting your Zoom meeting as the host. Click the upward arrow to the right of Share Screen, then select “Multiple participants can share simultaneously.” This allows multiple participants to share their screens at the same time.
Please note: Participants using the Zoom mobile app can only share if no one else is sharing.
Sharing screens at the same time:
Any participants (including the host) using the Zoom desktop client can click “Share Screen” to begin sharing. Even if someone is already sharing a screen, another participant can begin sharing. Depending on their setup, participants will see the following:
- Participants using dual monitors can see the two most recently shared screens on each monitor.
- Participants using a single monitor see the most recently shared screen. Participants can select View Options to change the screen they are viewing.
- Participants using the Zoom mobile app see the first shared screen. They cannot change the screen they are viewing.
As the host, you can choose to switch to the option “One participant can share at a time” for any portion of the meeting.
For more information about sharing multiple screens, visit Sharing Multiple Screens.
Once you have joined a meeting, click the “Share Screen” button. Whether you do so on your phone or computer, this button is found at the bottom center. On the mobile version, a pop-up will appear after you tap "Share Content." Tap "Screen” where you will then be prompted to choose how you'd like to screen-record. Instead of selecting "Photos," choose to "Zoom Broadcast" instead. After you tap "Start Broadcast" a countdown will begin to let you know you are now recording. A red band will appear at the top of the screen with a timer. Tap "Stop Broadcast" to end the live stream. Tap the red banner or return to the Zoom app at any time to stop or make audio changes.
Zoom meeting hosts can record meetings locally to their computers. Zoom meeting hosts who are licensed can also record Zoom meetings to the Zoom cloud.
In a Zoom meeting, press Record to start the recording. Learn more about local recording and cloud recording.
When you record your Zoom meetings, you have the option of local recording or cloud recording. A local recording is where you save the video and audio recording to your local computer hard drive whereas a cloud recording is where the video, audio, and chat of your recording is automatically uploaded to Zoom’s cloud service.
- Local recordings can only be accessed on the computer that recorded the meeting and if the meeting is unexpectedly shut down or the conversion process is interrupted, the recording could be lost. However, local recordings can be uploaded to other file storage services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, YouTube, and more.
- Cloud recordings can be accessed from a desktop or the web and easily shared through a link. Furthermore, Zoom offers automatic transcription of your cloud recordings.
Local recordings are saved to your "Documents" folder.
Cloud recordings can be found in Recordings after accessing the Zoom tile from SSO/My Apps.
Learn more about locating your recording.
For Cloud Recordings, the size limit is 1GB per recording, with no limit on how many recordings can be stored.
For Local Recordings, there is no limit. Keep in mind that local recording uses about 200MB per hour.
We recommend that you upload the recording to My Media and embed it inside your course. Alternatively, you can upload to a third-party service that can host large media files such as Microsoft OneDrive, YouTube, Google Drive, or Vimeo and embed the external link in Modules.
For more information, visit Managing Cloud Recordings.
There isn’t a limit on the number of recordings you can save to the Zoom Cloud.
For faculty and staff, there is a 210-day time limit for the Zoom Cloud storage.
For students, the Cloud storage limit is 7 days. After this period, recordings will be deleted from the Cloud.
It is recommended that you save all recordings to your computer and then upload to Canvas or OneDrive for long-term storage.
No, the storage limit will only affect recordings saved to the Zoom Cloud. Recordings saved on your computer will not be impacted.
No, attendance reports will continue to be available according to Zoom’s report retention period—which is typically up to 12 months.
Notifications will be sent automatically 7 days before the recordings are permanently deleted from your Zoom trash.
Access Zoom from Single Sign On (SSO) and select the "Recordings" link from the left navigation. Click on the name of a recording to download it and its associated files either individually or together.
When Zoom recordings are deleted from the Cloud, any links to them will be broken. We recommend that you save recordings to your computer and then upload them to Canvas. For instructions, visit the CSULB Kaltura in Canvas website.
No, only the original Cloud Recordings hosted on Zoom are subject to automatic deletion. Archived copies of recordings hosted on other platforms are not affected.
For Local Recordings, you can use the video editing tool Camtasia, which faculty and staff can download from Campus Software.
For Cloud Recordings, you can use the trim feature, which can only be accessed from the Zoom web portal.
If your camera is not showing up in the Zoom Settings or it is selected and not showing any video, visit the tips on troubleshooting a camera that won't start or show video web page.
Echo can be caused by many things, such as a participant connected to the meeting audio on multiple devices, or two participants joined in from the same local. Learn about common causes of audio echo.
Zoom allows meeting participants to annotate on a shared screen as a viewer or the one that started sharing your screen. You can also use annotation tools when sharing or viewing a whiteboard. If someone is unable to do this they may need to enable annotation from their Zoom account page online.
Zoom allows participants to give silent, non-verbal feedback such as clapping or thumbs-up using the Reactions button in the meeting controls panel. If someone is unable to do this, they may have to enable Non-verbal Feedback in the settings on their Zoom account online.
