Author: Jenny Spohrer

Public Zoom meetings recorded for WebinarTV

LITS has been alerted that Bryn Mawr College content is showing up on a website called Webinar.TV, which has been reported for hosting content recorded without webinar hosts’ consent.
It appears that these recordings were made when a fake person/bot registered for, attended, and used screen-capture software to record publicly advertised Zoom meetings or webinars.  (Here is a related Zoom forum post.)
Because the bad actors capture their screens using third-party software, the only way to thwart them is to prevent them from accessing your Zoom meetings.

If you publicly advertise Zoom webinar or meetings (for example, meetings advertised on a College website or social media), here are some steps you can take to secure them:

  1. Manually manage meeting/webinar registrations and deny anyone without a known email domain (gmail.com, hotmail.com or a recognized .edu).  Any automatically approved registrations (which is the default Zoom setting) do not deter this kind of bad actor. 
  2. Edit the meeting or webinar settings to Require authentication to join. This requires all attendees to log into a Zoom account before joining. (Attendees who don’t have one can create a free account.)
  3. Disable “join from browser” in your account settings. This applies to all meetings or webinars you host and forces everyone to download Zoom client software in order to participate. (Bots tend to use the web browser without authenticating, but so do some humans).

Note that you only need to use these measures when you host public Zoom meetings. Meeting links shared only with known associates are not vulnerable.

If you have any questions or would like help with Zoom settings, please contact the Help Desk on the first floor of Canaday (help@brynmawr.edu, 610-526-7636).

RESOLVED: Email from Moodle to Haverford email addresses failing to deliver

UPDATE: This issue is resolved and all email from Moodle is now being delivered again. Please report any continuing issues to the Help Desk. Thank you for your patience while we resolved the issue.

LITS has discovered that notifications and email sent from Moodle to Haverford email addresses are no longer being delivered.

We are actively investigating the cause and working on a solution, in the meantime:

  • Instructors, please use “Notify students” option on Bionic Course Rosters or Outlook to email a course if it includes Haverford students.
  • Haverford students, please log into Moodle to check for notifications about deadlines, etc.

We apologize for the inconvenience and will post a notice as soon as the problem has been resolved. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Bryn Mawr College Help Desk (help@brynmawr.edu, 610-526-7440).

Panopto: Scheduled downtime March 22 12:30-3:30am

Panopto has alerted us that there services will be down for up to three hours while they perform essential database maintenance and enhancements. This downtime is scheduled to start shortly after midnight on Sun, Mar 22 and conclude by 3:30 am at the latest.

During this maintenance window, videos on Panopto site will be unavailable for playback and you will not be able to upload new content to Panopto’s servers from the desktop recorder software. (Recordings can be stored locally until the server is back up.)

See Panopto’s status page for the latest information on system status.

RESOLVED: Panopto Unvailable TODAY, 10/10/2025

Update: The issue is resolved as of 4:25pm

Starting this afternoon at 2:55pm, community members both on and off-campus are unable to access the College’s instance of Panopto: https://brynmawr.hosted.panopto.com. LITS has reported this outage to Panopto and they are investigating.

Please contact the Help Desk with any questions: help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440.

Moodle Fall 20-Spring 22 Course Archiving on October 16

LITS has archived fall 2020-spring 2022 academic courses and will begin removing them from Moodle on October 16.

About course archiving

  • Per our Moodle policy, LITS must remove old courses from Moodle periodically to make way for new course content and to ensure optimal application performance.
  • To ensure instructors can continue to reuse those course materials in future courses, we create back-ups that preserve the course layout, resources and activities and move them to archival storage before removing them from Moodle.
  • Instructors cannot access archived courses directly, but can ask LITS to copy them into a new course shell at any time.
  • Academic courses from fall 2017-summer 2020 have already been archived in this way and LITS has been restoring them into new course shells upon request since fall 2020. See for details.

What action is required?

If you wish to export content from fall 2020-spring 22 courses, please do so before October 16.

  • You only need to export course materials and questions if you plan to use them outside of Moodle (including in other learning management systems).
  • For privacy and security reasons, archival back-ups do not contain student data or content. You must export this content to retain it beyond October 16.
  • See Moodle: Export Course Data and Content for how-to info.

Otherwise, you need to do nothing.

If you have any questions or would like help exporting content from Moodle, please schedule a consultation with an educational technologist or email help@brynmawr.edu to connect with our Moodle support team.

RESOLVED: Moodle Currently Unavailable

Update: Moodle is back up as of 6pm. LITS will continue to monitor.

Moodle is currently unavailable. LITS is working to diagnose and resolve this issue as quickly as possible and will update as soon as Moodle is back in service. Thank you for your patience!

Please contact the Help Desk with any questions or concerns: help@brynmawr.edu, 610-526-7440

MATLAB Licensing Updates

MATLAB (a programming language and environment for numerical computation, data analysis, visualization, and algorithm development) is moving to a named-account licensing model, which will change the options Bryn Mawr College faculty and students have for accessing it moving forward:

    • Anyone can get a free account to use MATLAB Online Basic.
    • Bryn Mawr faculty and students can now get an account on Bryn Mawr College’s new MATLAB academic teaching license to access the full suite of online features and install MATLAB on college-owned and personal computers. (Haverford students can get this access through Haverford’s license.)
    • We’ve left an older version of MATLAB that does not require an account installed on classroom and lab computers to minimize disruption, but faculty and students who need the latest version or additional toolboxes will need to get an account on the new academic teaching license.

Please see our MATLAB help guide on Ask Athena for more details.

If you have any questions or concerns, please stop by or contact the Help Desk (help@brynmawr.edu, 610-526-7440).

New Service: Zoom Scheduler for Appointment Booking

Bryn Mawr College faculty, staff, and students now have access to individual and team-based appointment booking through Zoom’s new Scheduler feature.

As with most online appointment-booking platforms, Zoom Scheduler allows you to create one or more booking pages that shows an individual’s or group of people’s availability for appointments. It can be used for both in person or online meetings: when an appointment is booked, Scheduler sends both parties a calendar invite with the in-person location or a Zoom link, depending on the type.

Get Help with Scheduler

Transitioning from Calendly to Zoom Scheduler

If you or your department uses Calendly (or another paid service) for online appointment booking, LITS recommends switching to Zoom Scheduler feature, which gives you the same functionality at no cost to your department.

Transitioning is a three-step process:

  1. Set up appointment booking in Zoom Scheduler. It’s okay to do this while you are still actively using Calendly; the two systems don’t conflict with one another!
  2. Find the places you’ve shared your Calendly booking links (in your email signature, on College webpages, on syllabi or Moodle course pages, etc.) and replace them with Zoom Scheduler links.
  3. Cancel your Calendly subscription and close your account.

You can stretch this transition over as many weeks as you need; however, if your Calendly license renews annually, be sure to cancel before your renewal date or shift to monthly payments to avoid unnecessary expenses.

If you need help figuring out how to recreate a Calendly workflow in Zoom, please schedule a Zoom Scheduler consultation with LITS!

New Zoom Features Coming Soon

We are delighted to announce that new features will begin rolling out to Bryn Mawr Zoom accounts in the coming weeks:

  • Everyone will get access to Zoom Scheduler, an appointment-booking app for in-person and Zoom meetings, including team appointment bookings like next available round robins.
    • Individuals and departments who subscribe to platforms like Calendly or Book with Me may want to migrate to Zoom Scheduler but can wait until it is convenient to do so.
    • LITS will provide detailed migration information and support starting in May.
  • Faculty and staff will be able to host Zoom Webinars with up to 500 participants in addition to Meetings with up to 300 participants.
  • Note you will need to log into the Zoom web portal to access these features. (The Zoom desktop and mobile apps have more limited features and the integrations with Moodle and Outlook are designed for Zoom Meetings only.)

There will be no downtime and no change in how Zoom Meetings work.

Please contact the Help Desk at help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440 if you have questions or concerns.