Zoom AI Companion

Using Zoom AI ensures students rely on institutionally approved tools rather than third-party services, such as Otter.ai. This helps protect student data and keeps your course compliant with university policies and data privacy standards, such as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).

Because Zoom is widely used at PSU for hybrid, online, and in-person classes, Zoom AI fits right into a familiar environment. This eliminates the need for students to learn to use new platforms and reduces friction by keeping all course tools in one place.

With automatic meeting summaries, searchable transcripts, and AI-generated highlights, students can review material more effectively. This leads to better retention and understanding and can be particularly useful for those who need to revisit complex content.

Using Zoom AI could reduce the need for costly third-party tools. Because PSU already has an enterprise Zoom contract, extending these features to your students could be more cost-effective and eliminate the financial burden of subscribing to paid tools.

The Zoom AI Companion supports a range of learning styles—visual, auditory, and textual. With features like voice-to-text transcription and keyword summaries, students can adapt the tool to their individual needs.

Students may misuse the AI features to seek answers during Zoom meetings, which could compromise academic integrity.

Zoom AI only summarizes content shared during the meeting; it will not disclose information tied to previous meeting summaries or the Internet. If needed, you can disable the AI summary for specific portions of your lecture or discussion.

While Zoom’s AI technology can provide real-time transcription and captions, it is not foolproof. Zoom AI might misinterpret complex terminology, accents, or fast-paced conversations, which could lead to inaccuracies that negatively impact the learning process. This is particularly critical in course content delivery where precise language and concepts are essential for understanding.

We recommend setting your account settings to share the meeting summary only with the meeting host by default, edit the summary for accuracy post-meeting, and then share it with students when it is ready.

While AI tools can support note-taking and study aids, they might unintentionally reduce human interaction in the classroom. This could affect the dynamics between instructors and students, leading to less active discussion, clarification of doubts, or engagement with human support services like tutors.

Consider including active learning activities encouraging student interaction, such as knowledge checks, think-pair-share, or exit tickets.

We encourage you to consider using AI tools to enhance learning and accessibility rather than to replace human interaction entirely. This feature is not enabled by default. You can decide whether to use it in your courses.

Some students may not have reliable access to the Internet or the necessary technology to benefit from the Zoom AI Companion fully. This could inadvertently widen the digital divide and put students from low-income backgrounds or regions with limited technology infrastructure at a disadvantage.

Avoid requiring or enforcing students’ use of this technology. Make the transcript available to students after the session, but try not to single out any student possibly facing technology challenges. We recommend sharing information with your students on accessing resources provided by the PSU Library, which include laptop and technology checkout options.

AI algorithms can sometimes exhibit bias based on the data they are trained on. In academic settings, this could lead to unequal treatment in transcription quality or highlight features for students with non-standard accents or dialects, which may further marginalize certain student populations.

Review the transcript for accuracy, spelling, and grammar to ensure it reflects your intended audience.

As AI tools collect and process large amounts of data, there may be concerns regarding how student data is stored, used, and protected. Although Zoom complies with FERPA, introducing AI tools could raise new privacy concerns or vulnerabilities, especially if sensitive student information is captured.

For confidential conversations, consider disabling the AI Companion and Summary during the meeting. Additionally, you might want to share the summary only with the host by default. This will ensure that you control when and how the data is shared.

You are encouraged to add a syllabus statement regarding the use of Zoom AI features to ensure students know that what they say may be included in a transcript summary with their name attached.

While student data is protected, we advise against engaging in conversations about student grades or anything FERPA-protected with the AI summary enabled. We also encourage you to ensure that only the host receives the AI summary for double reassurance.