A Note About Participant Limits
In case you’ve ever wondered, the most participants you can include in a meeting on the VCU Zoom account is 300.
You can verify this by logging in at vcu.zoom.us and check your “Profile” tab. Under “Account” you should see that you are a “Licensed” user with access to meetings that support 300 participants.
In most cases, this should suffice, but if you ever need to reach a larger audience, you have several options:
Live Streaming
Any Zoom meeting can be live streamed via Facebook, Youtube or a custom service. In the latter category are any number of providers you may have an account with, but also included is VCU’s Kaltura video hosting platform. If you’d like to use Kaltura to host your live stream, please contact us at [email protected] for help setting it up.
More details on how to use Zoom’s live streaming feature are available at these links:
- streaming via Youtube
- streaming via Facebook
- streaming via custom service
Keep in mind that by their nature, live streams are not interactive. Viewers can see what’s happening in real time (or on a slight delay) but they will not be seen or heard themselves, so they’d be more “viewers” than “participants.”
The “Large Meeting” feature
Zoom also offers an add-on feature called “Large Meeting” that provides support for 500 or 1000 participants via an annual subscription This is not part of the standard VCU Zoom plan and involves additional fees, so it won’t be for everyone, but if you know you’ll have a continuing need to support interactive audiences larger than 300 participants — say for a semester-long course with a very large enrollment — your department may decide it’s worth it.
If interested in this feature, contact us for more details.
The “Webinar” feature
Another add-on is Zoom Webinar, which is also offered in 500 or 1000-participant versions. It too is purchased as an annual subscription. Webinar behaves a bit differently from “Large Meeting” in that only those persons you’ve named as “panelists” will be seen and heard. All other participants interact via the Chat window and a text-based Q&A feature.
If you have a specific, one-time event where Webinar could be helpful, Technology Services owns a Webinar 1000 that can be “rented out” on a per-day basis. In order to make this option available to as many users as possible, we ask that you limit your requests to “one-off” events; if you know you’ll need Webinar on a continuing basis, it’s best to purchase a dedicated license. Again, you can contact us via email to put in a rental request or inquire about an annual subscription.
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