Zoom Breakout Rooms - For Faculty

Breakout rooms allow you to seamlessly split your Zoom meeting into separate sessions for small group discussion, and then bring those sessions back together to resume the large group meeting. As the meeting host, you can group participants into these separate sessions automatically or manually, and can switch between sessions at any time. 

Quick facts: 

• There can be up to 50 breakout rooms per meeting, with up to 200 participants per breakout room 

• Breakout room participants have full audio, video and screen share capabilities 

• Hosts can move between breakout rooms 

• Hosts can allow participants to select and enter breakout rooms as they please  

• Participants can request help from a host while in a breakout room  

Getting started: 

• Enabling breakout rooms 

• Using breakout rooms 

• Participating in breakout rooms 

• Managing breakout rooms 

Advanced options: 

• Pre-assigning breakout rooms 

• Self-selecting breakout rooms 

• Breakout rooms and recording 

• Tips 

Things to know about pre-assigning breakout rooms:

As a meeting host, you can split your meeting participants into breakout rooms when scheduling the meeting. This can be useful if you already know how you want to split up your participants. 

• Pre-assign participants in the web portal 

• This method is recommended for meetings with less than 20 participants. 

• Pre-assign participants by csv file upload 

• If you have more than 20 students in your class, and/or you will be using breakout rooms several times through the semester and wish your students to be assigned to the same breakout group each time, you can pre-assign breakout rooms with a csv upload. 

• You should use the students' email addresses that are listed in Canvas to populate the csv file. This is their official student email address as it is created through banner. Once you have created a csv with students' official email addresses, you can pre-assign breakout rooms with a csv upload. 

• Before your meeting, provide students your personal meeting ID or personal link 

Self-selecting breakout rooms: 

Hosts may give participants the ability to self-select which room they would like to join without needing intervention from the host.  

• Click Breakout Rooms once you have started your meeting  

• Select the number of rooms you would like to create and Let participants choose room: 

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• Click Create. Your rooms will be created, but will not start automatically. You can manage the rooms prior to starting them, then you may click Open All Rooms once you are ready: 

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• Now that the Breakout Rooms are in progress, all participants can hover over the number of people in each room to select the Join button, which will assign them to that room: 

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Breakout rooms and recording:

• If the meeting is being recorded to the cloud, the recording will only record the main room, regardless of what room the meeting host is in. 

• If the meeting is being recorded to a computer, the recording will include whatever breakout room the person recording participates in. Multiple people can record locally if allowed by the host. The host can designate one person in each breakout room to record locally and then share that file with the host after the meeting. This way, the host can have a record of what transpired in each room. 

Tips:

• Practice using breakout rooms before trying it for the first time as a meeting host. 

• Plan ahead: 

  • How many breakout rooms do you want to have? 

  • How many participants do you want in each room? 

  • Do you prefer to manually assign participants to rooms, or have Zoom randomly assign the rooms? 

  • You can also setup breakout rooms live during a session.