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MIT now has a site license for Zoom (as of Fri March 13). According to IS&T, "The license MIT has acquired for Zoom provides faculty and staff the ability to conduct online meetings of up to 500 participants and other members of the MIT community the ability to conduct online meetings of up to 300 participants." You can create an account using your @mit.edu address and log in with Touchstone. Students can log in the same way. All @mit.edu addresses can host meetings for up to 500 participants with unlimited duration.
- IS&T has a Zoom Landing Page with links to Zoom documentation.
Zoom requires all participants to install a desktop client (there are clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, possibly others). So warn your students in advance and ask them to install the client before class starts.
When you create the meeting, get the URL for it (from the bottom of the Invite Participants window) and send that URL to your students, rather than inviting students one by one. The full invitation also contains a meeting ID and password and dial-in instructions, so it's a good idea to include all of that.
Some other tips on setting up the meeting for a classroom situation:
consider setting video to "Host only" if students don't need to be visible
set "mute all participants on entry"
set "Who Can Share Screen" to "Host only"
set "who can chat" to No One if you don't want backchannel chat happening
- you can minimize the thumbnail video in the upper right
Apparently zoom also has a whiteboard capability like webex (Zoom support for whiteboards). This might come in very handy for online recitations and lectures. But be careful to test whether students can scribble on it without permission.
You can also share just a single app from your Desktop. So, e.g., you could share just your terminal, just Eclipse, etc. That could be very useful for writing code. And the host can break students out into small groups, and bring them back together.
Similarly, consider turning off Annotation (scribbling on top of the shared screen), because if it's allowed for the host, it's allowed for any participant. This might be fine for a small class, but could be disruptive in a large class.
Consider making another staff member a "co-host" of the meeting, so that they can configure things and do things like "Mute All Participants" while you focus on delivering the class.