Long Beach State has upgraded every student’s Zoom account to the pro membership level at no additional cost.
Implemented July 1, the upgrade gives students the same meeting parameters as faculty members, allowing them to host meetings with up to 300 participants for as long as 30 hours. However, student’s recordings of sessions can be saved for only one month in Zoom clouds, while faculty and staff recordings can be saved limitlessly.
According to Vice President and Chief Information Officer Min Yao, students had been requesting to hold Zoom meetings for longer than 60 minutes to better collaborate with other students and faculty, so the administration made the decision to upgrade all accounts to the faculty and staff membership level.
“We pay close attention [to] our students’ feedback about our technology services and constantly adjust our services to help our students learn more efficiently,” Yao said.
This is a significant increase compared to the basic membership level of Zoom access, which students previously had, that allowed for up to meetings of up to 100 participants and timed out at 40 minutes.
With this exponential increase in meeting time length, students are more capable of organizing study groups, club meetings and other activities. The expansion of hosting capacity provides student groups with large membership quantities to conference together more seamlessly.
“I think now that they have the option to be in a prolonged Zoom meeting, students are going to form study groups through Zoom rather than having to use other messaging sites,” said Chase Thesing, a third-year marketing student.