So the first thing to say is that this is an opt in setup and you must have both types of accounts for it to work.  The reason it is opt in, is so that office hours meetings or other private meetings that you might have associated with your zoom account, do not automatically get published to any course.

Another thing to note is that this integration is for cloud recordings from zoom.  If you are recording locally, you would have to upload from the “upload media” dropdown in your echo360.org library and then share it to your course.

When this is fully enabled though, the zoom recordings will be automatically sent to echo360 library, and optionally, to an associated course, so that:

1. Students see all video items from one location
2. Students may use the learning tools associated with echo360, such as note taking, flagging for confusion, bookmarks, and Q&A
3. Instructors get gather greater analytics re: student views and engagement
4. Use the echo360 video editor for zoom recordings
5. Use the transcript/captions editor from echo360 (and choose from either the automatically created zoom or echo360 to start from – we haven’t done an analysis yet to see if one is better than the other.)

Let’s walk through how to opt in and then how to connect the videos to a particular course.

Opting in, only shares the zoom recordings to your echo360 media library.  It does not connect it to a course, so this part is good for creating recording backups and does not expose content in any way to the public. This may be a good idea to enable if for no other reason that zoom charges for storage of recordings, and because of this, recordings will be deleted from the system on a regular rolling basis.

Login to your echo360 account by going to echo360.org and logging in with your stonybrook email address followed by your netid and password info.

Go to the gear icon -> Account Settings

From there click on Zoom Settings in the left column

Change the toggle to On

At this point, you will see that meetings are set, going forward, to be added to your Echo360 library.  You will also see a table of Zoom Meeting IDs, with their Meeting Name and where they are currently mapped to go.  If you don’t want to share any of these zoom meetings, leave them mapped to “Library Only”.  If you do want to associate a zoom meeting room with a particular course, simply use the drop down menu under Echo360 Sections, to choose which course/section you want that Zoom Meeting ID mapped to.

You can always come back to this Account Settings page to turn this feature back off.

Here is further information from the Echo360 support pages including:

• Add Alternate Zoom Email Address
• Mapping Zoom Meetings to Echo360 Sections

• Be sure you are logged into the Zoom App when you start the day and especially after your computer has been updated. The Zoom App is the application that lives on your computer. https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/installing-and-signing-int…
• Update your Zoom App weekly: https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/updating-the-zoom-app-on-y…
• If you are missing features in Zoom (can’t record, no breakout rooms), sign out of the app and sign back in to refresh your account: https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/signing-out-and-back-into-…

We also have a troubleshooting page for zoom that can be found here:  https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/zoom-troubleshooting-tips-signing-in-microphone-blackboard-general-issues

Thanks to Julie & Nichole for their tips as always!

Link to video – click here

Though we recommend running Zoom in the Zoom app… this may work for live captioning if you Zoom from Chrome instead.  Try it out and let me know!

The first demo is inside of Google Meet.  While we are a Google Apps campus, the fact that we can record right now freely inside of Google Meet is actually a feature that Google turned on during COVID-19, and not something that normally is included.

Google Meet does have a live captioning feature (run by computers) that comes with Meet.  However, as you can see in the screen shot below and compared to the recording, not only does it not give you any documentation of that live captioning afterwards, in the form of a transcript or regular closed captioning, it even disappears from the recording as well.  (How rude!)

Recording from Google Meet

screen shot from recording of same meeting:

Now in Zoom.

Screen Shot:

To get the live captions, I shared my screen with Google Slides and turned on live captioning.  This also does not produce a transcript at the end, BUT the live captions are captured in the recording, unlike Google Meet.  On the other hand, because I recorded to the Cloud in Zoom, an entirely new ASR caption file is created after the recording is done being processed.

Here is a screen shot showing both the live captions and the new post process created captions at once:

Here is the actual Zoom recording**:

https://stonybrook.zoom.us/rec/share/84usuh4yyp2J_qor9mlnr6lpenOhsYZFfpRzq1JqmvHwa4YEXzR7QO196J0VAZzY.nFjtJGL8UW_ohU2W Passcode: 8?Lq4Jrj

And last but not least, a recording with echo360.  This time the slide that I throw up to get live captioning leaves google out entirely.  This one I use MS Powerpoint for the live captioning.  This would have behaved the same way in Zoom.

One of the nice things about echo360 is that the viewers can decide how big some of the components are (using the Source pull down option), so it is possible to give those automatic captions a bit more window real estate for easier visibility.

Keep in mind, that the automatic captions in a recording are visibly seen, as I showed in Zoom and echo360, but are not screen readable.  The post processed captions or transcripts are screen readable.  On the other hand,  the Google Meet recording does not show them at all in the recording and has no post process ASR capability built in.

Final break down:

Google Meet Zoom Echo360
live captions Yes Yes* Yes*
live captions visible in recording No Yes Yes
streams live Yes Yes Yes
records For now Yes Yes
ASR post process No Yes when recorded to cloud Yes if turned on
*If used with another application such as Google Slides or MS Powerpoint and the screen is being shared

**  Don’t be hating on my COVID-19 pants!

Someone wrote me and asked what Adaptive Learning was.  Her is my quick answer:

“The idea of Adaptive Learning, is that there is a program monitoring the understanding/progress of the student, that can shift what their next course of action is (a reading, or quizzing, etc) based on performance.  So it has built in remediation, and possibly acceleration, depending on the actual platform.  Some of them are made by for profit publishers, and some work largely with open educational resources and funding from grants. They make an interesting case [as a tool] for helping students meet course objectives in a remote environment.”