November 20, 2020 FAC/STAFF

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Deadline Extended: Purging Prior Semester Zoom Recordings November 23, 2020

Colleagues,

Like it or not, many of us have become fairly adept at using Zoom since last spring. We are writing to let you know about one of Zoom’s realities and tell you how we as a campus will be dealing with it.

As you know, the Teaching and Research team (formed as part of last summer’s pandemic scenario planning process) recommended that, in general, faculty should record synchronous Zoom sessions and make those recordings available to students in the class. We are fortunate that Zoom makes that fairly easy to do via its Canvas integration.

Unfortunately (and unlike many of our other campus systems), Zoom cloud storage is not unlimited. In fact, we have already filled our allocated cloud storage and paid for additional, which is, itself, already above 50% capacity. After some conversations around campus, ITS brought the proposal below to the Data Governance Task Force, who have given it their blessing.

Zoom sessions are able to be recorded to both local storage and the Zoom cloud. (These practices apply only to recordings saved in the Zoom cloud.) Zoom cloud storage is provided to customers on an annual subscription basis. As such, the total space utilized by Zoom storage must be managed to control storage expenses.

In order to better serve students who may not be able to attend classes during the pandemic, most classes offered via Zoom are recorded and made available to students in that class to allow all students to be successful regardless of their personal circumstances. However, after the deadline for incomplete work has passed, all recordings for that semester (and prior) will be removed by the Zoom administrator.

If you wish to keep your Zoom recordings, they can be easily downloaded and moved into other platforms, such as Studio and made available to the students in the class via Canvas. Faculty who wish to preserve these recordings are encouraged to do so in this manner as Canvas courses and course content remain available unless the instructor specifically changes access. Our JCU Google Drive accounts have unlimited storage and may also be a good repository for your archived videos.

In order to secure sufficient storage for fall semester recordings, all recordings from Spring and Summer 2020 (all recordings prior to August 24th) will be deleted on November 23rd. Nothing will happen to any Fall 2020 Zoom recordings before January 18, 2021. After January 18, all cloud recordings from Fall 2020 will be removed. We will use Inside JCU going forward (as well as email reminders for this academic year) to remind you about this process and let you know how to request that recordings be retained (in the event of an incomplete extension).

* Guide to move your Zoom recordings to Canvas Studio: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dlEZs3TS2R73yPc3wzH9yubHLmck9vibZxRTI5uGZBE/edit

If you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to contact the ITS Service Desk at 216-397-3005 or email at servicedesk@jcu.edu.

Information Technology Services
jcu.edu/its