Joining a Zoom meeting

Communicating in your course Zoom

Zoom is a cloud-based technology that allows faculty, staff and students to have high quality interaction in real time from their computers and mobile devices. 


The following information will outline the different ways participants may join a meeting. Meeting leaders may provide additional instructions on how/when to join a meeting.


The following includes two examples:

  • Join a meeting via a link (link in Canvas or email).
  • Join a meeting via a meeting ID.

Pre-meeting checklist

  • Review the System Requirements.
  • Be prepared to interact with the meeting leader and meeting participants via Audio and Video (webcam).

NOTE: The meeting leader may enable or remove access to audio and video tools during the meeting.

Join a Meeting

Meeting leaders have several options for sharing meeting information. Consider the following scenarios:

  • A meeting leader may use the same online meeting room (same meeting link) for an entire semester. 
  • A meeting leader may schedule different meeting rooms for each meeting. In this case, the meeting link and meeting ID will change for each meeting. 

Meeting leaders may share information, including the meeting title, date/time and the meeting link/or meeting ID via a link in Canvas or a link in an email.

Join a Meeting from a link (URL)

To join a Zoom meeting via a link, seelct the link to begin the meeting launch process. In the example below, the meeting link is included in an email beginning with the letters “https” (See Figure 1).

zoom meeting invitation with a link to join the meeting

Figure 1: Zoom meeting invitation

  1. Select on the link.
  2. Next, follow the prompts as they appear on the screen. Depending on the browser and operating system, the prompts may differ slightly (See Figure 2).
    zoom meetings launch pop up box
    Figure 2: launch zoom meetings application

If this is the first time you are attending a Zoom meeting, you may be prompted to install the Zoom application.

You may be prompted to select the Zoom application. Select OK to continue to launch the process.