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You can use Zoom’s Personal Meeting Room feature to have a dedicated URL to use for virtual office hours on demand. This functionality makes it easy to share a single URL to use across terms and classes, without the need to schedule individual Zoom sessions for scheduled office hours.

Note: to schedule office hours with your Zoom Personal Meeting Room, you need to schedule that directly in the Zoom Desktop App or the Zoom portal at pdx.zoom.us and then import the meeting to the Canvas Zoom area.

  1. Sign in to Zoom at pdx.zoom.us with your PSU Odin.
  2. Click the Meetings link on the left navigation.
    Zoom Personal Meeting navigational menu, Profile, Meetings (highlighted), Webinars, Recordings, Settings.
  3. Click the Personal Meetings Room tab from the top navigation.
    Upcoming Meetings, Previous Meetings, Personal Meeting Room (highlighted), Meeting Templates
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Edit this Meeting button.
  5. For office hours, we recommend the following Meeting Options:
    Disable Join Before Host. This means you will need to start the meeting before participants can join.
    Enable Waiting Room. This means you will need to allow individual participants to join the meeting one-by-one. This is critical to maintain student confidentiality and meet FERPA requirements.
    Enable Only authenticated users can join.
    Restrict to Signed in with a Portland State account (Odin).
  6. Adjust other Meeting settings as desired. (See recommended settings for preventing Zoom-bombing.)
  7. Click Save when done.
  8. On the Copy the Invitation link from the Personal Meeting Room Information page.
  9. Copy the invitation information and save in a convenient location.
  10. Share the invitation URL with students as your office hours location.

Note: Students will be able to click the link at any time but will be in a holding space until you (1) start the meeting and (2) let them into the meeting. You may receive “Your Attendees Are Waiting” email notifications when students click the URL if you are not in the meeting.

Learn more about waiting rooms, and see it in action in the video below.

This article was last updated on Jan 11, 2022 @ 3:54 pm.