When it comes to public sessions, Zoom currently has two options to make for secure environments to hold your sessions: Webinars and registered Zoom meetings.
Webinar
A Zoom Video Webinar allows you to broadcast a Zoom meeting to up to 1000 view-only attendees (this is the size of the CBC license). As the host or a panelist, you can share your screen, video and audio in a webinar and attendees can use the chat or question and answer options to interact with the host and panelists. Participants are not able to share their video displays, and are only able to speak with permission from the host or panellists.
Webinars can require pre-registration, with the option for the host to add custom registration questions, or registration can be turned off for attendees to join by simply clicking a link. Webinars can be held once, can reoccur in a series, or can be the same session held multiple times.
Webinars should be used for very large gatherings of people that are being talked to, with little interaction. This increases the meeting security by removing most of the avenues of attack for Zoombombers, since the participants don't have video broadcasting ability at all and only approved audio broadcasting.
Registration for Zoom Meetings
You can also use registration to make your regular Zoom sessions be more secure, while also allowing for more public options. This option allows you to approve only the participants that have registered to be allowed into your meeting. This article from Zoom has more information on how to setup registration for your meetings. It is also recommended that you follow some guidelines on also helping to secure your public registered video sessions. Zoom also has some suggestions to help make your experience more secure.
Regular Zoom meetings are great tools for interactive sessions with smaller groups. These allow up to 300 people, but it is recommended to move to a webinar for the larger or public groups, to reduce distractions.
If you would like to know more about the differences between the two options, this article from Zoom has a nice chart to help you visualize the differences.
You can host your own registered video sessions at any time. In order to host a webinar, you will need to contact TS by emailing tshelp@columbiabasin.edu to get more information.