During pandemic, many birth educators discovered some benefits to online virtual classes, and may choose to continue to offer them even as many classes return to in-person. If you’re continuing online, do you know how to keep your classes secure? It’s important to know how to minimize your risks of “Zoom bombings” where unexpected people appear, and may say (or chat) offensive things, have their webcams aimed at something offensive, or share offensive videos.

First, I want to reassure you that the chances of this are small. Between me and my co-workers, we taught hundreds of classes online this year with no incidents. But I did have a severe Zoom bombing at church early in the pandemic when we didn’t know how to prevent it or how to manage it. So, just like there are simple smart things you can do to keep your physical classrooms safe for in-person students, there are simple steps you can to do protect and manage your online classroom.

When scheduling, make it secure:

When you initially schedule a meeting, you can take steps for security.

• For meeting ID, generate a random ID for each class series, don’t use your same personal ID for everything
• ALWAYS require a passcode (Zoom will give you a random number as a password – you can change it to a word if you want to, I don’t bother)
• DO enable the waiting room
• For video settings, use your judgment. It is more secure to have your students come in camera off – reduces the risk they could show an offensive image. However, community building in my classes is important to me and that is greatly enhanced by them being able to see each other. If they come in camera on, they tend to stay on. If they come in with their cameras off, it’s really hard to talk anyone into turning theirs on.
• I do not allow participants to join anytime. It’s less secure, plus I don’t like “arriving” at a class to find people already in the room who then watch me as I “set up”
• I mute participants when they enter, because it means if they come in late, they won’t accidentally disrupt anyone if they happen to be talking just as they join the meeting.

Don’t tell the whole world where to find your class:

Don’t post your Zoom links widely on the internet where they can be found by anyone – think about other options, like emailing the links only to specific participants.

You can also require that participants register for the Zoom session. (Learn how here. When they do this, they get a customized link for the class. And they have to give their email address to register, so you could track them for security’s sake, but you also now have their contact info for marketing purposes. (We offer free sample classes that people register for, then we add them to our email list for future marketing newsletters.)

Doublecheck Your Settings:

When you start a meeting, check your security settings by clicking on the shield in the command bar.

For a meeting with known people, I usually set security so they can rename themselves, and unmute themselves and use chat, but NOT share screens. In some situations, with participants you don’t know, you may need to have tighter security than that and give them less access.

Waiting Rooms:

When people log in to the meeting, you’ll see their names appear in a separate part of the participants list, and you click to “admit” them to the meeting. It lets you just quickly check to be sure you recognize the name before you let them in. (Also, potential Zoom bombers see there’s a waiting room, get bored and move on.) For meetings of over 30 people this may be challenging for one person to manage, so consider having a co-host help you admit folks.

Be wary of weird names… if you feel suspicious about a name, don’t let them in. You can send a message to the waiting room, saying “you must use the name you registered as to be admitted. To change your name, leave the meeting, then log back in with the correct name.”

You can choose to “lock” a meeting once all attendees have arrived.

Controlling Things During the Meeting:

There are several ways you can manage an individual’s options during a meeting. The controls to do this appear in two places – the participant list and the 3 dots on their image. Let’s first look at the participants list controls.

Click on the participants button to bring up the participants’ list. (During a call, I keep the list open – it’s good for quickly fixing minor problems.) By clicking on anyone’s mic, you can mute them. By clicking on anyone’s camera, you can turn it off. It’s helpful to be able to mute someone who is accidentally making noise – like they don’t realize their mic is on while their dog is barking. I have turned off someone’s camera when their toddler came running into the room naked.

If you mouse over a name on the list, you’ll see that you have the option to mute them (or to ask them to unmute) and you have something that says “more”.

Under more, you’ll see several options. You can send a chat message to them. Pinning their video makes their image large as if they are the speaker. No one else can tell that you’ve pinned them. I find this helpful to get a closer look at someone. (For example, if they’re practicing positions, you can pin to see what someone is doing so you can give feedback.) There are several other things you can do here. The last three are important for security.

“Put in waiting room” just takes someone out temporarily and you can re-admit them at any time. (I’ve used this for tech rehearsals, where we put some early arrivals back in the waiting room so they don’t have to listen to us practicing.) If you “remove” someone, then they will not be able to rejoin the meeting, so only do that if you don’t want them to return. If you did have a Zoom bomber, you could also report them.

Note: you can also access these same options by mousing over someone’s webcam image and clicking on the 3 dots in the top right corner.

If you have just one problem person, you might be able to manage them by muting, turning off their camera, turning off chat, or removing them from the meeting.

However, what if there’s lots of problem people? Some groups have experienced Zoom bombings where many people appeared all at once, all sharing offensive videos. If something like that happens, you have two “nuclear options.” First: click on the security shield. Click on “suspend participant activities.” This will turn off everyone’s camera, mute everyone’s mic, and block them all from chatting and sharing screen. Once you figure out who the problem people are and deal with them, you can turn these things all back on one at a time.

If things ever go really bad (e.g. 10 participants all sharing pornographic videos as their images), plan to end the meeting immediately! Just let your participants know in advance that if anything problematic ever happens, you’ll just immediately end the meeting and send all your participants an email with new links.

Make security your default setting:

Above, I discussed how to make any one meeting more secure. You can also adjust your account settings to make many of these things the default for all your meetings. Go to https://zoom.us and sign in to your account.

You can make it the default to always have a waiting room, always require a passcode, etc. Note – you’ll see an option for “only authenticated users can join.” That’s really designed for workplaces or schools and will rarely be useful to a birth educator. (For example, my Zoom account is through Bellevue College, so this would only let in people with Bellevue College email addresses and block everyone else, which would mean almost every birth class student would be blocked.

If you are teaching on a different platform than Zoom, consider exploring the security controls and instructions distributed by the platform you are using.

Learn more about teaching online:

I have lots of free Zoom tutorials available on my website. You may want to check out posts on: improving your connection to minimize freezing, setting up PowerPoints for the smoothest sharing experience, doing demos on Zoom, and making Zoom meetings more interactive.

I also wrote a post specifically about teaching online birth classes. 

Sharon Muza, LCCE, FACCE and Mallory Emerson, LCCE teach Creative and Confident classes about virtual birth classes.

About Janelle Durham

Janelle Durham, MSW, LCCE has taught childbirth preparation, breastfeeding, and newborn care for 20 years. She trains childbirth educators for the Great Starts program at Parent Trust for Washington Children and teaches young families through Bellevue College's Parent Education program. She is a co-author of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn and writes blogs/websites on childbirth education; parenting toddlers & preschoolers, and teaching science to ages 3 - 7. Contact Janelle through her website and learn more.

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