There are technological steps professors can take to prevent such attacks, but many, like Gharavi, are learning on the job about the privacy settings of the webcast platforms they're now using. "And what happened was horrifying and potentially triggering to some of my students." "I have never had a day as nightmarish as that in the classroom where I was completely unable to control what happened," he said. Gharavi said the entire incident left him shaken. They were like, 'this isn’t your fault,'" he said.
"I got a lot of emails from students saying how upset they were, but they were all very supportive. He also sent out announcements to students over Canvas, a learning management system, apologizing for the "awful" intrusion. "I spent the next day and a half researching methods of controlling a meeting on Zoom, trying to develop a set of tech fixes that would allow me to maintain tight control over what happens in a Zoom classroom."
I wasn’t an expert enough at managing a Zoom meeting yet to control it, so I finally ended it because the atmosphere was hostile to my students," Gharavi said. "I tried to keep going with class, but I just had to end it early because I had no way of controlling what was happening. He hopes it was the latter, because he didn't want to believe his students would do such a thing. Gharavi doesn't know if the disruptive participants were students behaving badly or hackers who infiltrated his virtual classroom. The professors were the victims of "Zoombombing" - the "Zoom" in this case being the online meeting and course-hosting platform, and the "bombs" typically taking the form of racist vitriol or pornographic content shared with the group by an unwelcome user. The University of Southern California reported similar incidents occurring while professors taught classes on the same platform, indicating that the massive migration of college classes online due to the public health crisis came with a new threat - one that's technical rather than biological. They were vulgar, racist, misogynistic toilet humor. "The chat window became incredibly active. Participants were using fake screen names, some of which he said were very offensive.
“I didn’t notice it until a student on chat said something about it,” said Gharavi, an associate professor in ASU's School of Film, Dance and Theater. Right off the bat, he said, one of the participants used a Zoom feature that lets a user display an image or a video in the background in order to show a pornographic video. His first Zoom session for an approximately 150-student Introduction to Storytelling course went terribly wrong. Like many professors across the country who've been displaced from college campuses because of the coronavirus pandemic, Lance Gharavi suddenly found himself teaching his spring semester courses at Arizona State University online using the Zoom meeting platform.
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