Students at UC San Diego were blindsided at the start of the Winter Quarter 2022, when large class sizes prevented some students from being able to join the Zoom calls for their remote classes.

Remote instruction at UCSD for the first two weeks of the winter quarter was initially announced on December 21, 2021, lasting until January 17, 2022. Recently, this period of remote learning was extended on January 6, 2022, to last until January 31, 2022. UCSD uses Zoom to conduct all online classes, from large lectures to small discussion-based seminar classes.

On the first day of the quarter, students in large classes were unexpectedly met with a Zoom message stating that the meeting had hit meeting capacity. For Zoom meetings held using a UCSD account, Zoom’s technology restricts meeting hosts to a 300 person meeting limit.

Daniel Suchy, the Senior Director of Education Technology Services at UCSD, commented that there were “86 classes with official enrollments over 300 in the winter [quarter],” including popular classes such as CSE 11 and PSYC 1, and not including classes with waitlisted students that would put the class total size over 300 students.

To exceed a Zoom call’s 300 participant limit, UCSD needs to buy an extra license for the professors that require a larger meeting capacity. Although Suchy confirmed that UCSD “did buy … enough licenses for all those 86 classes,” he stated that those licenses were not provided automatically to all professors who needed them, and professors were required to request them.

“I think what … we saw at the beginning of the week was some instructors who needed one didn’t realize they needed it until they fired up the Zoom,” Suchy stated.

Nishant Balaji, a second-year computer engineering student, faced the Zoom room limit problem in his COGS 108 class. Balaji commented that he “didn’t foresee the problem before the quarter started,” and even though “the professor created a new Zoom link to overcome the limit issue, [the new room] still had the limit.”

Even though Balaji was able to access the lecture by “asking a friend to stream it via the ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] server on Discord,” he believes that this method of online learning is unsustainable because he can’t “directly [access] the class and can’t directly interact with or ask questions on chat.”

UCSD students also posted about the COGS 108 Zoom meeting limit issue that led students to resort to Discord streams of the Zoom lecture on the Facebook UCSD memes page.

Balaji also noted that his first COGS 108 class had a room limit of 100 students, possibly due to “the professor setting it up himself.” Even though the professor had “two Zoom links, [with] the main one not supporting over 100 and the other one [supporting over 100 students],” Balaji added that “[the professor] was only lecturing to the main one.”

CSE 11, a popular introductory computer science class, was plagued with similar issues. The Zoom limit was only resolved after the first lecture despite the class having a class size of 395, not including the many waitlisted students.

Suchy noted that if Zoom classes continue on into the spring quarter, the UCSD Information Technology Services department will “communicate the heck out to the departments to make sure they understand, here’s what you do to get a license … [since] we’ll have more time to get ahead of the communications.”

Angela Shu is a Staff Writer for The Triton.