Inside Higher Ed
Online Zoom classes were disrupted by individuals spewing racist, misogynistic or vulgar content. Experts say professors using Zoom should familiarize themselves with the program's settings.
[This is happening to instructors here at IVC.]
Like many professors across the country who've been displaced from college campuses because of the coronavirus pandemic, Lance Gharavi suddenly found himself teaching his spring semester courses at Arizona State University online using the Zoom meeting platform. His first Zoom session for an approximately 150-student Introduction to Storytelling course went terribly wrong.
Right off the bat, he said, one of the participants used a Zoom feature that lets a user display an image or a video in the background in order to show a pornographic video.
“I didn’t notice it until a student on chat said something about it,” said Gharavi, an associate professor in ASU's School of Film, Dance and Theater. Participants were using fake screen names, some of which he said were very offensive. "The chat window became incredibly active. Most of the comments were not on topic. They were vulgar, racist, misogynistic toilet humor. I would barely even call it humor."
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Zoom has also published a blog post on steps to take to keep would-be crashers out of Zoom meetings. The blog post gives tips on controlling access to meetings and setting up password protections and managing participants' ability to share their screens, as well as information on other options for controlling participants' activities including disabling participants' video, muting participants, turning off file transfer and annotation options, or disabling private chat functions. The company also suggests trying its waiting room feature, which it describes as "a virtual staging area that stops your guests from joining until you’re ready for them."….
