Zoom Breakout Rooms allow you to split the participants in a meeting into smaller virtual “rooms,” where they can have separate groups for discussions and collaboration. The meeting host can choose to split the participants into the breakout rooms automatically or manually. You may also set a predetermined time for groups to meet within the breakout rooms and then join the participants back together later. For more information on how to use and set up breakout rooms, see this Knowledge Base article.
Potential Applications
- Breakout Rooms are a useful way to divide students into groups to facilitate smaller discussions. This provides students the opportunity to speak and engage with each other.
- Breakout Rooms allow students to work on a group assignment or project.
- Utilize randomized breakout room assignments in order for students to work and collaborate with more classmates within class session.
- The instructor/ host can move participants between breakout rooms after a determined time (e.g., five minutes to discuss a specific question) to foster students to interact with more classmates.
Tips and Tricks
- Only the host can create breakout rooms.
- You can create up to 50 breakout rooms in a single Zoom session.
- Up to 200 participants can be pre-assigned to breakout rooms.
- If you have required authentication, you can assign breakout rooms using participants’ email addresses.
- Mobile users can join the breakout rooms, but can’t create or manage them.
- Manual breakout room assignments have to be recreated each time; Zoom cannot save them.
- Group members within a breakout room can use the chat feature but the chats created within the breakout room will only be visible to the members within the breakout room. Once the breakout room ends and the members rejoin the larger group, the chats created within the breakout room will still be visible to the breakout room members.
- If the meeting is being cloud recorded, it will only record activity the main room, and will pause if the host leaves to a breakout room.
- If the meeting is being locally recorded, the recording will follow the host. To record activity in breakout rooms without the host, participants will need to be given recording permission and they can record locally to their computer.
