Breakout rooms

TIP: Make sure people know what they are doing before you send them off! What you want them to do, how and what to bring back (if relevant). You can support/supplement this with having a facilitator in each room / providing instructions in the Chat or on a shared online document. See further down on how to manage these things.

There are three main steps to having people in Breakout Rooms

1. Create the Rooms (or “Recreate” if used before in meeting) – where you choose the number of rooms
2. Assign people – done auto by Zoom and/or manually by you
3. Open the Rooms

Steps in detail

Select how many rooms you’d like to create and then let Zoom automatically divide participants into them at random OR manually choose who goes in which room.

At any point you can Move a participant to a different room or Exchange (swap) them with a participant in another room.

Think about using a combination of automatically dividing all participants into ‘X’ rooms, and then adding and/or deleting some rooms, and assigning remaining people and exchanging people.

Every time you Recreate BORs and assign people automatically, Zoom changes the order of assignment randomly.

Note: for large groups, you could use an assistant to assign people to different rooms in the background while you continue to run the session. See “Managing large meetings” below for more details.

When you finally click “Open All Rooms” participants will either be asked to Join their BOR or will be sent there automatically – depending upon what you chose in Options …

Important: This is only possible if

1. people have signed up to Zoom with their email address
2. AND you have a list of all those email addresses

For how to do this please see this Zoom guide or Google “how to pre-assign breakout rooms in zoom”.

This document has some useful tips for pre-assigning people (halfway down)

Problem: not everyone has been assigned their room

If, when you click on Breakout Rooms, some people aren’t assigned to the rooms you pre-assigned them. There are two reasons.

1. You typed their email address in wrongly
2. They joined without signing in
3. They have joined with a different email address/Zoom account
4. They joined the meeting AFTER you clicked the Breakout Rooms button. Even if you then closed it down and clicked again after they joined. The full explanation is below. The simple solution is to click “Recreate” and choose “Recover to pre-assigned rooms”.

Explanation for reason 4 above

Breakout Rooms require three stages:

1. CREATE the rooms (you specify number of rooms and auto or manual)
2. Assign and/or move people around
3. OPEN the rooms

If you have “pre-assigned Breakout Rooms”, when you click on the “Breakout Rooms” button, the pre-assigned settings are used to create the rooms (so stage 1 is in effect bypassed). AND any participants currently in the meeting are auto assigned to their appropriate rooms.

BUT, anyone who has not yet joined the meeting isn’t.

Now, if you close down the Breakout Room screen and the rest of the people join the meeting, and then you click on “Breakout Rooms” button again, NOTHING has changed!
Same rooms, same assignments as before, with none of the new people added.

This is, I think, an unintentional result of the feature that allows you to set up and open Breakout Rooms, close them down, and then later click on “Breakout Rooms” and re-use the previous assignments.

When you assign people to BORs they are listed alphabetically. So ask your facilitators to rename themselves by prefixing @ in front of their name – e.g. “@ Jane Mellor”.

Then, when you manually assign people to rooms, all your facilitators will appear together at the top of the list of participants (sorted in alphabetical order), making it easier to manage.

OR, assign participants automatically, then go through each room, making sure you have at least one facilitator in each room (using “Exchange” to swap them with a regular participant)

Consider sharing your mobile with all the facilitators and communicating anything important via WhatsApp or text.

To make someone a Co-Host

• Click on the “participants” button to get a list of all participants
• Hover over someone and click the “more” button that appears
• Click on Make Co-host

Co-hosts moving between rooms

Co-hosts can move freely between all the rooms. However, there are some limitations:

• The Host MUST assign all co-hosts to rooms (any rooms)
• Co-hosts MUST join their “assigned room” BEFORE they can access this screen
• This last limitation may have been removed by Zoom since the writing of this guide.
  If a co-host “Leaves” their room (instead of “joining” another room), they MUST FIRST re-join their original room. Only from there can access this screen and then “Join” a different Room.
  If co-hosts plan to move around a fair amount, this last can be a bit disturbing for people in that room … as the co-host re-joins briefly, only to move to another room.

If, as a Co-host, you cannot see the list of Breakout Rooms, click your “Breakout Rooms” button
You can then “Join” any Room.

Note: for some devices co-host won’t see a “Join” button on the far right, but will see the number of people assigned to that room. To join the room – hover over or click that and you should see a “join” option.

TIP: create a BOR just for the co-hosts and assign them all to that room. That then becomes the co-hosts’ “home” room. They can then leave and join freely without disturbing any other participants.

There are two ways of doing this

Using Zoom option

This allows ALL participants to choose which room they want to enter AND to freely change rooms whenever they wish.

However, “self-select breakout rooms” feature requires desktop client or mobile app, version 5.3.0 or higher. Other platforms can’t self-select a breakout room to join.
So anyone with an old version of Zoom will not be able to select their room and will have to be assigned by the Host as normal.

Using the “renaming” trick

This method relies upon the fact that when you assign people to BORs they are listed alphabetically. It takes a little longer than the previous method and requires most participants to rename themselves. However, it works for everyone.

• Provide people with the list of rooms available, and make sure each one has a number 1-9 or a letter A-Z associated. You could use Chat or Screen Share for this.
• Ask everyone to rename themselves, by prefixing their name with the number or letter of the group they want to join (e.g. A Sue, B Simon etc). They need to …
  • Click on “Participants”
  • Click on their name
  • Click on “Rename”
• Use the Participants list to watch people do this (and to see when they have all done it)

• Create the Rooms and choose to assign participants Manually
• If you want you can rename the Rooms (e.g. “A current strategy”, “B post-Covid strategy” etc). This is mainly for your own use – although people will see a message “joining Breakout Rooms – B post-Covid strategy”.
• Participants will now be listed (alphabetically) in the order of the room they want to join, making it much faster to assign them to the correct rooms.

Note: if you get too many people in any one room, simply add another BOR for that topic and put half of them in that.

Use ‘automatic’ assignment to start with

With a lot of people it can take too long to ‘manually’ assign people to BORs. So use a combination of automatically dividing all participants into ‘X’ rooms, and then adding and/or deleting some rooms, and assigning remaining people and exchanging people.

Use an assistant as a temporary Host to set rooms up

Have an assistant set up the BORs and assign people to them in the background, while you continue to run the session or explain about the BOR session coming up.

Because only the Host can manage BORs, you will need to make the assistant the Host (temporarily). Use the “Participants” button, click on the participant and click on “Make Host”.
They can then “Open All Rooms” when you are ready.
Afterwards, click on “Participants” and “Reclaim Host” button.

Be aware that this means they will receive any requests for help, rather than you. If this happens, you or they can remove you from your room, you can then talk to them in the Main Session and/or they can then assign you to the relevant room. You could be in communication with them via text or mobile to manage this sort of thing. Not chat, because that doesn’t work across BORs.

Before you start the BORs

Be careful about using a long “Countdown” once you click “Close All Rooms” – it will mean you may not be able to close down the rooms quickly if you have to.

Consider having pre-assigned and prepped facilitators in breakout rooms OR get each room to agree one and make sure everyone knows the reason/role for facilitators (e.g. ensuring everyone gets to speak, agreed upon practice/behaviour etc). See “Have a facilitator / group leader / co-host in each room” above.

Make sure people (and/or facilitators) know the following:

How to “Ask for Help” from the Host

A “Help” button that appears when people are in a BOR (bottom menu for laptops, and top right for tablets and phones).

If you click “Later”, they will see “The host is currently helping others. Please try again later.”

How to return to their room if they (deliberately or accidentally) leave it

If they leave their room (deliberately or accidentally) they can return by clicking their “Breakout Rooms” button on their menu (laptops) or “Join Breakout room” button top left (tablets and phones).

Choose “Options” (or it may be a Cog if you’re using Mac) …

Then choose these two settings …

This will make it simpler for people, but at the same time, give them less choice/freedom.

They won’t be asked if they want to join their room and they won’t be able to leave it until you close the BORs down.

How do you share the same information with all the BORs? For example, previously discussed questions, agenda, guidelines, action points etc. These might be in the form of:

• some short text (a description, a question to debate, a short list)
• a web page
• an online document (e.g. a Google Doc, PDF) containing information
• a PowerPoint presentation
• a video

There are a number of ways round these problems, however none are ideal.

Whichever method you use, remember to remind people they can ask for Help from you when in their BOR (see “ask for Help” section)

Use Chat: if everyone is on a computer or laptop (and just need to share text and links)

If everyone is using a computer or laptop, Chat is retained into and out of BORs

Use Chat: and Copy and Paste (the simplest/quickest method)

Enter the information and/or links into Chat. Then ask everyone (who is comfortable doing this) to copy it and then, when in their BORs, for one person to Paste it back in. They can use right-click and copy/paste (or Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V for PCs OR Cmd+C / Cmd+V for Macs).

Use Chat: and get everyone to open a Document (before they go into BORs)

Enter the link to an online document (e.g. Google Doc) and ask everyone to open it. You could then have links to other documents, videos, web pages listed on the document.

A few people may struggle to “move between” programs – i.e. if they open a Word or PDF file, they may no longer be able to see the Zoom program or window. So be prepared for this.  So ideally, it requires that everyone is comfortable switching between Zoom and the open Document and back again 🙁

Use File Transfer (in Chat): and get everyone to open the Document (before they go into BORs)

Open Chat and click on the ‘File’ button and then ‘Your computer’.
Once the file is sent, participants will see a notification and can click ‘Download’ to download the file. They can then open it.

However there are some issues/considerations with this as described above:

• Some devices (like phones) won’t be able to receive/open the file.
• Consider using simple formats such as rich-text format (RTF) or PDF rather than Word that not everyone might have on their device (especially phones).
• A few people may struggle to “move between” programs – i.e. if they open a Word or PDF file, they may no longer be able to see the Zoom program or window. So be prepared for this.  So ideally, it requires that everyone is comfortable switching between Zoom and the open Document and back again 🙁

Use Chat: only for a small number of BORs

You could copy the Chat, and then go into each room in turn and paste into their Chat. Okay if only a few rooms – otherwise slow and clunky 🙁

Use Chat and/or Screen Share: use Co-hosts/”room facilitators”

Set up people with the required information beforehand and they can then copy into Chat and/or share their screens in their Room. Requires quite a lot of preparation and enough co-hosts able to do this 🙁

How to “Ask for Help” from the Host

A “Help” button that appears when people are in a BOR (bottom menu for laptops, and top right for tablets and phones).

If you click “Later”, they will see “The host is currently helping others. Please try again later.”

If a meeting is being “cloud recorded”, it will only record the main room, regardless of what room the meeting host is in. So, consider pausing recording during BORs, to make the final recording shorter. But remember to turn it back on [another reason for having a “meeting assistant”].

If “local recording” is being used, it will record the room the participant who is recording is in. So similarly, you might want to pause recording if confidentiality in BORs is an issue.

Multiple participants can record locally. So, 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. Ideally, make sure other people have permission to do this BEFORE the event starts (in your Settings). However, the host can enter any Room and enable the Local Recording option for any participant.

You can set a time limit on the BORs when you create them (e.g. 5 mins) or manually “Close All Rooms”

“Broadcast” a message to everyone a few minutes beforehand – e.g. “Rooms will close in 5 minutes”

Be careful using a long “Countdown” once you click “Close All Rooms” – it will mean you may not be able to close down the rooms quickly if you have to.

After closing down the BORs, you can open them again.

Either re-open the last set of rooms with the same people assigned to the same rooms (“Open All Rooms”).

OR “Recreate” a brand new set of rooms from scratch.

They will join the Main Session and see “The host has opened Breakout Rooms. Please wait to be assigned.”

If you can’t see the list of Breakout Rooms, click on “Breakout Rooms” button.

On the far right of each Breakout Room row, you’ll see either an “Assign” button or the number of participants in that room (see picture). Click on “Assign” or the number to assign them to that room.

If you are in a BOR yourself

If Waiting Room is enabled you’ll see a message at the top of your screen telling you someone has joined the Waiting Room

Otherwise, you’ll see a message at the bottom of your screen “1 unassigned participant”.

You can either “Leave the room” to first welcome them in the Main Session, or (from inside the BOR) click on “Breakout Rooms” and “Assign” them to a room.

In the unlikely event anyone cannot join a BOR (some rare equipment/devices) – have them meet with some others in the “Main Session”. To manage this, you can go and join different rooms and ask for volunteers to leave those rooms and join this person in the “Main Session”.

Be aware that if recording is happening, you may want to pause it in this situation.