The world, particularly the educational world, is Zooming. Many Zoom users – teachers, professors, coaches, managers – are recording their Zoom meetings locally on their computer.

Great, but what do you do with those recordings? How can you share them? How do you get users to engage with the recordings? 

We give you some options in this post.

Sharing Zoom meetings to YouTube works. But it isn’t safe, private, easy to manage, and it doesn’t allow discussion. We talked about that in another blog post on why sharing video with YouTube is really a terrible option for groups.

Sharing Zoom Recordings on YouTube

But if you want to do it on YouTube, here’s how:

1. Record your meeting in Zoom. Here’s the Zoom support article on how to do it.
2. That’ll eventually convert to an .mp4 file
3. Log into YouTube and use the little Camera and Plus sign icon near the top right. Here are the YouTube instructions.
4. Set your video to “Unlisted” in YouTube.
5. Share the link to the video (just copy it from the browser address bar when the video is visible) with the people you’re sharing with.

Sharing Zoom meeting recordings on Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, and Dropbox 

Sharing files over email, or into shared drives like Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, and Dropbox works, but you lose control of the video and you can’t have private discussions in the group about it. This is what Zoom itself recommended in 2015. (Bet you didn’t think Zoom was around in 2015!). Here’s how you’d do it.

1. In whichever service you choose, create a folder for the Zoom recordings you want to share. Give it the name of your group.
2. Invite people to join the folder using the link from the service you’re using.
3. When you make a Zoom recording you can just move it into the desktop folder and it should sync to the Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, or iCloud folder so others can see it.
4. You should try to set your folder so that your group members can’t delete videos from it.

Dropbox is probably best here because they have an integration with Zoom. But your Dropbox free account can only store so many videos.

Using WeVu to Share Zoom Recordings (a better option!)

If you want a walled-off, private site for your group, one that keeps your videos safe and allows your group to discuss the videos, it’s easiest and best to do this, whether in education or otherwise, on WeVu. (You can do it for Audio, Image, or PDF files too!)

If you have WeVu sites for your groups of learners or employees, you:

1. Record the Zoom session. According to the Zoom support article here. Use the local computer option to make it easier to find and upload to WeVu.
2. Once the meeting is done, it’ll compress to .mp4 in a folder on your local computer.
3. In your WeVu site, where your group members are site users and you are the site owner, you upload the meeting file. You can put it in a particular Playlist to organize it if you want.
4. If you’ve set it for email notifications to users, they’ll get an email with a link that takes them right to the video. Of course, when they log in as normal too, they’ll be able to see it anytime.
5. Now your users can discuss the video or audio file using time-stamped comments and replies, or location-specific comments and replies on image or pdf files.

There are some other services for sharing videos, as we discussed here, but WeVu is the easiest and gives your users the opportunity for maximum engagement and dialogue around your Zoom events, anytime afterwards.

Here’s a picture of a Zoom meeting in WeVu. In fact, it’s a Zoom meeting uploaded to YouTube and imported to WeVu, but it’ll work just the same if you upload to WeVu and avoid YouTube altogether! See the time-specific comments and replies (on the right) about a particular statement a participant made late in the meeting?

Problems with YouTube video sharing

We see at least three problems with using YouTube to share videos.

First, it’s not really all that private because if you set it to Unlisted and share the link, and then that link gets shared just a little too far, then those people share the link, you’ve lost control and your only option is to take the video down. Maybe it can be posted again with a new link but then the cycle might start all over again.

Second, it’s cumbersome to keep multiple videos organized for the group. People often resort to another tool to store the links, like Facebook or Google Sheets. One high school basketball team, for instance, had a shared google spreadsheet with the names of the games they had played and a column with the link to the appropriate video. If you have a larger group with sub-groups, like teachers with groups in their classes, this gets really clunky and takes a lot of effort by the organizer. You can use YouTube Playlists, but you’ll have to provide a link to each one if your group wants to have multiple videos in multiple lists.

Third, while there are comments allowed on YouTube videos, they are only general comments, not tied to specific moments in the video. And they just appear in the chronological order they were made, so they’re not great for a group that wants to discuss what was happening and particular times in the video and have a dialogue about that, back and forth, asynchronously.

The solution  to these problems is to use a private video site that lets you import YouTube videos, organize them by putting them in playlists or assigning them to subgroups, and allows commenting and replies tied to specific moments in the video.

Tools for private group video sharing

Here are some tools to do this (jump down to our recommendation):

• Vimeo lets you do this. But you can’t import video directly from YouTube. And the timeline commenting is only available in the Pro version, which is $20USD/month for 3 users or $50/month for 10. Not really affordable for the kinds of groups that will be needing to store video on YouTube.
• Frame.io is a nicely design video review app for creative industries. You could get a Pro account at $17/month and then have unlimited ‘reviewers’ so everyone in the group could watch and make comments. But they can’t upload their own video to the site or import from YouTube.
• Ziflow is pretty similar. $18/user/month but you can also have unlimited reviewers with that one $18/month license. And same problem here: reviewers – group members -- can’t upload their own video to the site or import from YouTube.
• Lumière is another one, designed for entertainment market research. You could use their free version, import YouTube only, and you’re limited to 25 people in the group. But their interface is really nice and even has pointers to spots on the video as well as timeline comments. The drawback is that those users don’t have accounts: you’re still just sharing a link even though it’s a Lumière link and you can put a set of videos in each ‘Activity’ that you share.
•  VideoAnt was made by the University of Minnesota and still works, hosted free. It does have user accounts, connects to each user’s YouTube account, and has time-specific comments and replies. It even has groups. Not a bad solution at all. One disadvantage is that you can’t group videos together into playlists or assignments that your group members have to do. If you were running a pottery class and had students video themselves, upload to YouTube, and import to VideoAnt, your student videos would just be a jumble of videos on your catalog page in VideoAnt.
• LookAt is another video review tool with pricing similar to Ziflow and Frame.io.
• Dropmark might work. There’s a free version, which lets you bring in videos and other links, but to use it with a group you’ll need the Team plan at $5/user/month. And it looks like the commenting isn’t time-specific.