Zoom Breakout Rooms

1. Click the Breakout room button on meeting control bar (it may be under the More menu).
2. Choose the number of rooms you want to create and how many attendees should be in each. Attendees can be moved into the rooms: manually by the host, randomly by Zoom, or attendee’s choice.
   • Assign automatically: Let Zoom split your participants up evenly into each of the rooms.  
     • Include co-host(s) to breakout rooms: Disabled by default, you can include any co-host(s) in the automatic assignment of breakout rooms. 
   • Assign manually: Choose which participants you would like in each room. 
   • Let participants choose room: Participants can select and enter rooms on their own.  
   • Load pre-assigned rooms: Choose from pre-assignments or previously saved assignments (if available).
3. Before you open the rooms, click the gear icon to update options such as “auto close after 10 minutes”.

Zoom lets you pre-create breakout rooms and pre-assign attendees to each room, easing transitions during your meeting.

When scheduling or editing a meeting in the Zoom web portal or UB Learns, go to the Options section and select Breakout Room pre-assign.

• You can name up to 100 rooms and assign up to 1000 attendees to those rooms.
• You can create rooms and assign people manually or you can upload a .csv file.
• You can create rooms ahead of time without assigning people to them.

Follow this process:

1. Edit the meeting
2. Beside Options choose Show
3. elect Breakout Rooms pre-assign
4. Click + Create Rooms
5. Click the plus (+) icon beside Rooms to make as many rooms as you want (up to 100)
6. Optional – Edit the room names
   1. Hover over a room on the right side of the dialog box
   2. Click the pencil icon to edit the name.
7. Optional – Add participants
   1. For each room, click into the Add participants field
   2. Add a single email address and click Return/Enter
   3. Each address added will show up in the list below

See: Pre-assigning meeting attendees to breakout rooms

The problem most often seen with pre-assigned breakout rooms is that attendees do not sign into the Zoom desktop or mobile app before joining the meeting. The only way Zoom can recognize who's who is when they authenticate by signing into the application with the same email address used to assign them to a breakout room.

Anyone who appears with (Guest) after their name will not be recognized and will not be sent to a breakout room automatically. 

Adjust these settings for your meetings with pre-assigned breakouts:

• Turn off Join before host for any meeting with pre-assigned breakout rooms 
• Enable the security setting Require authentication to join for your meeting. This setting makes it required to login before joining
  • Zoom has documentation on how to set this for an existing meeting
  • With this setting enabled, participants who are not signed into Zoom with their UBIT account will be prompted to sign in before they join the meeting

If you have pre-assigned breakout rooms setup for your meeting, it is possible to also use breakouts that aren’t pre-assigned. It isn’t difficult to do, but it will take a little time to create extra rooms and manually shift people to those rooms.  The order of operations for using two different breakout room sessions is shown below; the process can be reversed to use the pre-assigned rooms first.

When you are ready to do the small groups, open the Breakout rooms dialog box.

Use the Add Room button to add more rooms.

Use the Move To button next to attendees’ names to move some people out of assigned rooms into the new rooms.

Click Open All Rooms

When done with the first session Close All Rooms

1. Before the second session, open the Breakout rooms dialog box
2. Click Recreate
3. Choose Recover to pre-assigned rooms
   
   

Attendee names will move back to their pre-assigned rooms and the extra rooms will be deleted.

Attendees can chat and share their video, audio, and screen in a breakout room.

Attendees in a breakout room can unmute their mics and turn on their video even if those functions are not available in the main meeting room.  When they return to the main meeting room, audio and video will be muted/off if that is how they were before everyone went into breakouts.

If chat is disabled in the main meeting it will also be disabled in the breakout room.

Breakout room participants can click “Ask for Help” to send a generic help message to the meeting host. The host can join the room to assist.

Breakout room participants can view chat messages that appeared in the main room prior to entering a breakout room. When they return to the main room, they will be able to see chat messages from their specific breakout room along with any new main room chat messages.

Chats sent to the main room during the breakout session will not be visible to people in the breakouts even after they return to the main room.

Breakout room participants can only share their screen in the breakout room if they are allowed to do so in the main meeting.

• We generally recommend limiting screen sharing to the host and co-host in a meeting to limit disruptions.
• If you would like breakout room participants to share their screens open screen sharing just before you open breakout rooms. Click Host tools and under Allow all participants to: select Share screen.
  • Remember to disable screen sharing for participants when the breakout rooms are closed.

Hosts can broadcast text messages to attendees in all breakout rooms. These messages appear for about 10 seconds in all breakout rooms. There is no way to broadcast a text message for more than 10 seconds.

Hosts can share in breakout room controls click Broadcast > Broadcast voice.

Hosts can share their screen into all breakout rooms at once. Tick the option to Share to breakout rooms in the Share screen dialog box.

See  Sharing screen and broadcasting to breakout rooms.  

Polling is not available in breakout rooms. You can, however, assign participants to breakout rooms based on their response to a poll given in the main meeting room.

When recording to the cloud, only the main room is recorded. A host may record any breakout room locally (on their computer) by joining a room and clicking record in the meeting controls.

A host can permit participants to make a recording of their breakout room in two ways.

• Give individuals this option by clicking the More button next to the participant’s name and choosing Allow to record to computer.
• Give all attendees permission by click Host tools and under Allow all participants to: select Record to computer.
  • Remember to disable local recording for participants when the breakout rooms are closed.

Locally recorded videos can be shared on a platform such as Box, OneDrive, or Panopto

Just before you open the breakout rooms, click the little gear icon in the lower left of the screen. Check Auto close breakout rooms after NN minutes.  If this box is un-checked the breakout rooms will remain open until you choose to close them