Requesting a Zoom Webinar

When to use a Zoom Webinar?

There are some fundamental differences between Zoom meetings and webinars, so it is important to identify which of the two is best suited for your needs.

Zoom Meetings are designed to be a collaborative event with all participants being able to screen share, turn on their video and audio, and see who else is in attendance.

Webinars are designed so that the host and any designated panelists can share their video, audio and screen. Webinars allow view-only attendees. They have the ability to interact via Q&A, Chat, and answering polling questions. The host can also unmute the attendees. Attendees in webinars, can not rename themselves as well.

For a full comparison, please see the article Zoom Meetings vs. Webinar.

Zoom Webinar Licensing Requirements

Special Licensing is required in order to gain access to the webinar features within Zoom.  Licenses must be assigned to the user who will be creating the Webinar within Zoom and this person is considered the Host.  We currently have a pool of webinar licenses which are assigned on a first come first serve basis.  In order to request a Webinar License for a given date, Please fill out the request form below.  Faculty and Staff may request a webinar license for 500 or 1000 participant capacity.

If you do not necessarily need Webinar features, but would like to host a meeting with more than 300 participants(the default limit), you may also use this form to request a "Large Meeting" license, which supports up to 1000 participants.

Webinar License Request Form

Event Registration

Because a webinar license is required to access the webinar features within Zoom, this also means that a License must be assigned to the host for the duration of the Event's participant registration.  In order to preserve our limited supply of licenses, we ask that you do not request a webinar license to be assigned more than 6 weeks prior to an Event.

Getting Started with Webinars

If you are new to hosting Webinars, we recommend reading the following articles in order to become familiar with the key concepts.

Getting Started with Webinars

Roles in a Webinar

Closed Captioning and Live Transcription