(Updated: November 5, 2020 with more tips!)
Zoom’s breakout room feature allows you to split your Zoom meeting into separate sessions (up to 50). It’s a terrific feature in Zoom, but there are a number of gotchas and quirks. I serve as the IT Director at my employer, and I have spent several months using and managing a ton of Zoom breakout rooms at my association, and I hope to save you some aggravation.
Zoom Breakout Rooms: Lessons Learned
Zoom provides a basic overview on how to use breakout rooms in a YouTube video (3 minute length). But before you can even try it out, you have to activate the feature as it’s disabled by default. Visit your Zoom “In Meeting” settings page to enable it. I recommend enabling the optional setting for “Allow host to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling”. It doesn’t hurt to have that as an option.
Important Caveats for Zoom Breakout Rooms
- Breakout rooms are only available in Zoom meetings — not webinars.
- You can control whether users may return to the main session. If they do return to the main session, they can click on “Breakout Rooms” to go back to their assigned room.
- Until just recently, users were unable to pick from the list of breakout rooms. But new with client version 5.3 (September 25, 2020), it is now possible to define breakout rooms that users can self-select (yay!). But the meeting host and participants need to be on Client 5.3.0 or later to self-select Breakout Rooms.
- If you want to update and/or check your current Zoom version, one way is to click on the little avatar/profile pic icon in the top-right corner of your Zoom app. From there, you’ll see a menu choice for “Check for Updates”. Zoom also has a helpful little video on this.
- People who join using the browser version of Zoom instead of the full Zoom client program won’t have the ability to self-select a breakout room if that feature is enabled. However, the host can still manually assign those users to a room.
- A Zoom co-host cannot manage breakout rooms. If someone is set as an alternate host on a Zoom meeting, and if that person is the first person to start the Zoom call, they are the official host and can manage the rooms.
- If there’s a host and co-host on the call, but you want the co-host to manage the breakout rooms, promote them to be “host” and they will get the Breakout Rooms button. You’ll be demoted when that happens, so you might need to ask the new host to re-promote you to co-host if you need the other host-related features. Note: having the full host privilege can be toggled at any time throughout the call. Just visit the participants screen during an active Zoom meeting to do so.
- There’s a broadcast feature that will send a brief message to all users in all rooms. It works most of the time but we have seen it fail to broadcast on occasion.
- If the meeting is being recorded to Zoom’s cloud (i.e., “cloud recording”), Zoom will only record the main room, regardless of what room the meeting host is in. If local recording is being used, it will record the room the participant who is recording is in. Multiple participants can record locally.
- While I personally haven’t used a Chromebook, Zoom indicates (as of April 2020) that Chrome OS users won’t be able to join breakout Rooms. They will remain in the main room. If you know there will be several Chromebook users, you could treat the main room as their alternative session for those users.
Pre-Assigning People to Breakout Rooms Before the Zoom Call
While it’s pretty easy to manually assign a small number of people to breakout rooms during an active Zoom call, it can be time consuming and difficult to try and assign a lot of people into specific rooms. Here are some tips and caveats on using Zoom’s CSV File Import feature.
- You can pre-assign people to specific breakout rooms by importing a CSV file via the Zoom website. However, keep in mind that 200 is the maximum number of people that can be in your CSV file. Zoom will ignore any rows beyond that.
- Since the CSV import relies on email addresses to identify people, it’s critical that all attendees either have a Zoom account, or that you configure your Zoom meeting to require registration. The latter is recommended as a more reliable approach. When Zoom registration is used, each person gets a unique Zoom link sent to their email which lets the Zoom system know without a doubt, who connected to the meeting.
- When naming the breakout rooms in the CSV file, it’s best to not use a comma “,” as part of the room name, as you’ll have this end result inside of Zoom:
Room Name as Provided in CSV: East Region, Room 1
How it appears in the Zoom meeting: “East Region, Room 1” - You can import a revised CSV file via the Zoom website as often as desired before the Zoom meeting starts. But once the Zoom meeting is active, any attempt to import a CSV file will be ignored!
- You would naturally assume that Zoom rooms would be listed in alphabetic order within the active Zoom meeting, but they are not. Actually, I can’t figure out how or why Zoom lists room names when created via a CSV file import. :-/
- If you use pre-assigned breakout rooms, you can safely switch to a different arrangement of breakout rooms during the meeting (e.g., automatically assigned or manually assigned), and then return to the original pre-assigned breakout rooms later on too.
- Last and most important! Don’t panic that when you click on Breakout Rooms that people aren’t assigned to the rooms as denoted in your CSV file. I personally panicked when this happened. But as people continue joining the Zoom call (there are always late stragglers!), you have to use the button to “Recreate All Rooms” which re-examines who has actively joined the Zoom call and assigns them to the rooms as denoted in your CSV file. When I first used the CSV import option, I had assumed that as people joined the call, their names would automatically fall into the assigned rooms. But that process stops when the host clicks the button for Breakout Rooms. Lesson learned: wait till just before you need the breakout rooms to click the button for Breakout Rooms. Or, just remember to use “Recreate All Rooms” shortly before you go to “Open All Rooms”.
- OCTOBER 2020 UPDATE! A new version of the Zoom application has fixed the issue noted above. When the host has Zoom client version 5.4 (or higher), participants will automatically get assigned to their pre-assigned rooms as they join the Zoom call. Yay! Please note that only the Zoom host has to be on the newer Zoom version for this to work.
More Tips and Recommendations for Zoom Breakout Rooms
- When creating breakout rooms in a live Zoom meeting, you can choose between Assign Automatically, Assign Manually or Let Participants Choose Room. The automatic option is easy and works well as long as you don’t need to put a lot of people into very specific groupings. If you use the new “Let participants choose” option, you might have users who don’t actively choose when you open the rooms. You can still manually assign those users, if needed.
- If you’ll have around 100 or less people and if you also have at least 15 or 20 minutes for a staff person to focus on the task of manually assigning people to specific rooms, it can be done! We have routinely held round-table Zoom calls where we ask attendees to use the ‘Zoom Rename’ feature to add a letter or short code designation to their name so that the attendee can designate a preference on which breakout room they’d like to join when the time comes. If attendees perform that simple ‘rename’ step, and if you have a staff person on the call as the Zoom host who isn’t talking or presenting and can focus on assigning people to their preferred room, it can be done!
- As long as you haven’t “Opened” the rooms yet, you can still change your mind and play around with the number of rooms and also the assignment of people to rooms.
- If you have some staff who don’t want to go into a breakout room, just don’t assign them to a room! You might also opt to give staff the “co-host” privilege (via the Participants screen) which allows staff to easily leave and join any breakout room.
- Do you have leaders or facilitators that need to be assigned to each breakout room but you need to use the “Assign automatically” mode? Here’s a tip: ask your leaders to rename themselves in zoom to have a special letter in front of their name, E.G., “F – John Smith”, which makes it easier to manually assign your facilitators to specific breakout rooms.
- There’s an optional feature called “Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically”. It works well and I recommend it. Without using that option, when you (as the host) click to “Open All Rooms”, users have to acknowledge by pressing a button on their screen to move to their room. Some users on mobile devices have had problems getting into their breakout room which is solved with the ‘automatic’ option.
- If your audience will be large and you go with the pre-assignment feature, as mentioned previously, definitely use the Zoom registration feature for that Zoom meeting. When we have done this, I’ll grab an export of Zoom registrants at least one hour before the call so that I can massage the list of names into the CSV file format that Zoom requires for importing for room pre-assignment.
- If you have people register for your Zoom call just before the call, obviously they won’t be in your CSV file. So I just look for people who don’t show as assigned to a room and I manually assign them just before using the “Open All Rooms” button.
Be sure to also checkout the new post that goes into greater detail about the two recent Zoom updates to breakout rooms.
I hope these tips and lessons learned is helpful to you. If you have any feedback or suggestions for improving this article, please let me know in the comments below or email me at lifeafter40@outlook.com.