Dear all,
As you may have noticed, Zoom is somewhat clunky when it comes to our lab sessions. For us to provide you with the best experience, here are a few guidelines which should hopefully make it less painful for everyone.
First, please make sure that your Zoom client is up-to-date to the latest version (https://zoom.us/download). They have added and fixed a bunch of features over the past year, so some functionalities may be missing in your current version. You may be using the in-browser web app (which is fine), however again some features are unavailable there (such as selecting your own breakout room).
During the lab sessions, you should have access to a breakout rooms button in your bottom bar (with the last version of the desktop client):
Feel free to join any of the listed rooms with your teammates.
During the lectures you can ask questions in the usual meeting chat. However, as soon as the lab session starts, please understand that Zoom erases the meeting chat history every time we move across rooms. Thus we may completely miss a message there while we are in another breakout room.
To fix that, we have created a persistent Zoom chat channel, which can be accessed from your main Zoom interface, using the "Chat" tab at the top with the latest version (see below).
If you don't see it, it means we were unable to invite you there (i.e. you either do not use a Zoom account, or one with a different address than @epfl.ch). In that case, feel free to comment with your account's email address below, or if you'd rather not share it you can also send me a private message on Moodle or an email directly at alexandre.chau@epfl.ch (please mention CS-476 somewhere).
Feel free to use this channel during the live lab sessions: you can ask questions directly there, or request help for a particular breakout room. This will allow us to organize and see who needs help at all times.
Of course, you can also answer your classmates, and use the Moodle forums (https://moodlearchive.epfl.ch/2020-2021/mod/forum/index.php?id=391) when we're offline.
Thank you for your understanding,
Best,
The TA Team
