A Q&A call on Thursday
Your course runs a weekly live Q&A. Students are in London, New York, Sydney and Dubai. The call is at 6pm UK time, which is fine for half of them and impossible for the rest. Every week someone joins an hour early or late because a clock changed in one country and not another.
After the call, the recording sits in Zoom's cloud. On Saturday you download it, upload it to the course platform, write a title, create a lesson in the Q&A module, and post in the community that it is up. The students in Sydney, who most needed the replay, get it four days later, by which time the question they sent in advance feels stale.
Where the time goes
Live calls are the most valued part of many courses and the most admin-heavy. The call itself is an hour. The work around it is repeated every week by hand: invites, reminders, questions collected in advance, recording, upload, titling, posting and letting people know. Daylight saving changes on different dates in different countries make the scheduling part error prone twice a year.
- Times are announced in one time zone and students convert them themselves.
- Recordings wait until someone has time to move them.
- Replays have no description, so students cannot find the part they need.
- Questions sent in advance are not linked to the answer in the replay.
- Nobody tells the students who missed the call that the replay is ready.
What slow replays cost
Students outside your time zone feel like second-class members, and they are the most likely to ask for refunds or not renew. Your own time goes on a weekly routine that does not need you. And a library of untitled replays is much less valuable than it could be, because nobody can find the ten minutes that answer their question.
Scheduling and a replay pipeline
- Live sessions are held in one shared calendar, and each student's invite and reminder shows their own local time.
- If you run alternating times for different regions, students are invited to the sessions that suit their time zone, with the option to attend any.
- Questions submitted in advance through a short form are collected into a list for the call, tagged with who asked.
- When Zoom finishes processing the recording, a service collects it through the Zoom API and uploads it to your course platform or video host.
- A transcript is produced, and a language model such as OpenAI's or Anthropic Claude drafts a title, a summary and chapter markers for each question answered, which you can edit.
- The replay is posted in the right module, and a message goes to students who were not on the call, and to anyone whose question was answered, with the time stamp.
| Step | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Call time | Announced in UK time | Local time in each invite |
| Recording | Moved by hand days later | Collected when processed |
| Title and notes | None, or written late | Drafted with chapters, you edit |
| Telling students | A community post | Personal note with the time stamp |
The summaries are drafts. You approve them, or set the pipeline to publish without review once you trust it.
Replays that arrive while they matter
Students in Sydney wake up to the replay and a note saying their question is answered at 23 minutes. The library of past calls becomes searchable, so the same question does not need answering five times. Your weekend no longer includes a video upload session. Twice a year, when clocks change, nobody turns up at the wrong time.
Do live calls feel like this?
- Students miss calls or join at the wrong time.
- Replays take days to appear.
- Past replays have no titles or chapter notes.
- Questions sent in advance are answered but the asker never finds out where.
- You upload recordings by hand every week.