Zoom Integration for Schools

Students do not need a Zoom account to join meetings created through OpenEduCat's Zoom integration. Meeting links generated from the timetable can be configured to allow participants to join as guests, consistent with your institution's existing Zoom settings. Students access the meeting link from their student portal. They click the link, and Zoom opens in the browser or the Zoom app without requiring them to authenticate with a Zoom account. If your institution's Zoom settings require authenticated participants for compliance or security reasons, that policy applies regardless of how the meeting was created.

After a session ends, OpenEduCat retrieves the participant report from Zoom's API using the meeting ID stored against the timetable session. The report includes each participant's display name, email address, join time, leave time, and total duration. This data is matched against the enrolled student roster for that session. Students whose email addresses appear in the Zoom participant report with sufficient duration are marked present; those absent from the report are marked absent. Partial attendance (joining late or leaving early) is recorded with the actual timestamps so administrators can apply duration-based attendance policies. The sync runs automatically after session end with no coordinator action required.

When a session is cancelled in OpenEduCat's timetable, the corresponding Zoom meeting is deleted through the API so the meeting ID is no longer accessible and students are not joining a cancelled session out of habit. When a session is rescheduled, the Zoom meeting's start time is updated to match the new timetable time. Students who have saved the meeting link do not need a new link. The same meeting ID is updated, so the persistent link they access from the student portal still works for the rescheduled time. For recurring sessions, a reschedule of a single occurrence updates only that occurrence without affecting the rest of the recurrence series.

Cloud recordings created during Zoom sessions are stored in the institutional Zoom account, not in individual faculty members' personal Zoom storage. After a recording is processed by Zoom, OpenEduCat retrieves the recording link and associates it with the relevant course session record. Faculty can configure access permissions at the course level, for example, making recordings available to all enrolled students, restricting access to students who attended, or keeping recordings accessible only to the faculty member and administrators. Because recordings are tied to the institutional account, access does not depend on the faculty member's continued employment at the institution.

The current integration creates and manages standard Zoom Meetings, which are appropriate for most course session formats, lectures, seminars, tutorials, and small-group sessions where participants can interact. Zoom Webinars, which are a separate Zoom product with a distinct license tier and a broadcast-only participant model, are not created through the standard timetable integration. Institutions that use Zoom Webinars for large-scale events such as orientation sessions, guest lectures, or all-institution broadcasts typically manage those through Zoom directly. If your institution requires webinar creation from within OpenEduCat for specific event types, this can be discussed as part of a custom implementation.