That Class Where Stanford Profs Projected Hundreds of Zoom Students on a Video Wall

Of course, not all institutions happen to have a video wall that’s 32-feet wide and 8-feet tall. But Stanford already did, in its Wallenberg Hall. So the three professors reached out to the university’s director of classroom innovation, Bob Smith, to see what they could rig up.

No matter how big your screen, Zoom can only display up to 49 people in each session. So the class was divided into three different Zoom sessions of up to 100 students each. Then a teaching assistant helped feed all three of those sessions into a fourth room, making it possible to control which speaker is featured on everyone’s feed but that can draw on users in any of the Zoom sessions.

“One way to think of it is as a four-party video conference, where three of the parties are themselves videoconferences,” Smith wrote the professors in an email. —EdSurge