Breakout Rooms
What are breakout rooms? Breakout rooms enable you to divide a Zoom meeting into smaller, separate, concurrent sessions. This can be useful for small group work, active learning techniques such as think-pair-share, discussion, project presentations, activities, and brief individual meetings with you or a TA during a longer session.
A few things to note about breakout rooms:
- The meeting host must assign breakout rooms. If you want your ZA or TA to assist setting up breakout rooms during a meeting, you must pass host privileges by hovering over your mouse over that name in the participant list and selecting More, and then Make Host.
- A co-host can leave and join any breakout room only if they first join a breakout room assigned to them by the host.
- Note if co-host is a co-host added during the meeting, it should be good, but if they are a co-host because they were assigned as an alternative host, they will not be able to move between breakout rooms.
- If a meeting is being recorded to the cloud, the recording will capture only the main room regardless of which room the host is in. If a meeting is recorded locally on a computer, the recording will capture the view of the person recording. It's possible for a host to allow multiple participants to record locally, if desired.
- Participants joining from a mobile app cannot manage breakout rooms regardless of role.
- To create breakout rooms where participants are free to join main room: When creating the breakout rooms, click on the settings gear icon in the breakout rooms management window, and ensure the box is checked to allow participants to return to the main room as shown.
- The host can float between breakout rooms. Participants who were promoted to co-host during a meeting and first join an assigned room can then freely move between rooms. However, if you assigned someone as an alternative host when setting up the meeting, and they are a co-host in the meeting as a result of being assigned alternative host, they will not be able to move freely from room to room. (This is a known issue but has not been fixed.)
- Participants cannot chat between rooms. They can only view the chat for their assigned room or the main session.
- Participants can click "Ask for Help" while in breakout rooms, which will send an alert to the host.
- Co-hosts cannot end breakout sessions.
Please read through this page on Zoom support Links to an external site. for a full list of breakout room limitations.
For more information, watch this brief video from Zoom:
Teaching with Breakout Rooms
For in-class activities, consider using Zoom breakout rooms. You can divide students into small groups to work together in real-time, then bring the class together as a whole. The guidelines here will help you set these up.