Create Zoom Sessions and Track Attendance

If your Academy platform is integrated with Zoom, you can create Zoom sessions and track participant attendance.

Super Administrator

Written By Donna Hanson-Squires (Super Administrator)

Updated at March 3rd, 2025

Academy integrates with Zoom so that you can:

  • Set up Zoom meetings/sessions directly from Academy
  • Track participant attendance at sessions, so that people can be automatically marked as Attended or Absent

 

Requirements

You MUST have a Zoom Pro or Zoom Enterprise account to in order to integrate.

To connect your Zoom account to your Academy platform, contact support@guroolearning.com. We will need to set up an app in your Zoom Marketplace account, so you will need to provide Owner/Admin login details in order for us to create the app. 

If you're using a Zoom Pro account, you will also need to set up a user in your Academy platform with the same name and email address as your Zoom Pro account user. When creating a session in Academy, the meeting will be created in this user's Zoom account.

 

Creating Zoom Sessions

To create a new Zoom session:

Add the Zoom meeting host as a Facilitator or a Coordinator in your program.  If you are using a Zoom Pro account, this will be your corresponding Zoom Academy user account.
Add a new section to the relevant page in Academy. Set the section type to Sessions. 2023-08-03_16-30-28
Set up your session availability rules in the same way you would for any other session. If you want Zoom to automatically track attendance, choose Mark Attendance as the completion rule.

In the session details, choose Webinar, then choose Generate Link Automatically.

 

In the Host field, choose the Academy user who will be hosting the meeting (this user must have a corresponding Zoom account).

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Choose the remaining meeting setting options. 

 

Set the number of minutes a user is required to attend the meeting in order to be marked as Attended. We recommend 70-80% of the full meeting length.

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To Start the Session as a Host

  1. Log in to the Academy user account that you have designated as the meeting/session Host.
  2. Access the Facilitation view and navigate to the Calendar tab in the left-side menu
  3. Go to the session and click the Start Session button.
     
This screenshot shows the Calendar view that facilitators and coordinators have access to within a program. Within the calendar section, the facilitator can see the program schedule including sessions and due dates for the entire program. This particular course is displaying two sessions, one in december 2024 and one in march 2025. The Session details corresponding to each session are captured within the screen, including session name, overview, facilitators and zoom link. There is also a button labelled 'Start Session'. This button is highlighted to demonstrate this is how the Host begins the session.

 

 

To Join the Session as a Learner

Zoom generates unique links for each individual user. This is how it tracks each person's attendance. Therefore:

  • The learner MUST join the session/meeting via their unique link in Academy.
  • The learner MUST NOT share their link with anyone else.
  • We recommend that learners don't add the links to their personal calendars. The unique links may change if the session is edited for any reason, and then the old link will no longer be valid.

Learners join the session/meeting via the Join Session button.

 

This image shows the 'session' object that a learner would see within their course learning journey. It includes the session details and overview, plus the 'add session to calendar' button. It indicates the two facilitators for the session and details the time and date. There is a 'join session' button highlighted in the middle of the session object, indicating that is how the learner will join the zoom session.

 

To View Attendance (as a Facilitator or Coordinator)

15-30 minutes after the end of the session, the participants in your course will be automatically marked as Attended or Absent. View the attendance record via the Mark Attendance button in the session:

This screenshot shows the Calendar view that facilitators and coordinators have access to within a program. Within the calendar section, the facilitator can see the program schedule including sessions and due dates for the entire program. This particular course is displaying two sessions in march 2025. The Session details corresponding to each session are captured within the screen, including session name, overview, facilitators and zoom link. There is also a button labelled 'Mark Attendance'. This button is highlighted to demonstrate this is how a facilitator can view attendees and update attendance status for the cohort.

 

NOTE: Occasionally a participant may have joined the session but may have been marked Absent. In most cases, this is because when the participant joined the meeting, they were already logged into Zoom with a different email address than the email address they use to log into Academy. In this case, Academy may not recognise them and they may be marked Absent.

In this case, you can override Zoom's automatic attendance marking and manually mark them as Attended.