Create and use breakout rooms

- [Instructor] During the course of your meetings, it's sometimes beneficial if you let your attendees divide into small groups to work out specific plans or to collaborate on individual projects. Now in real-world meetings, you can send people off to different corners of the meeting room or to other smaller rooms with the tools they need to be productive. So similarly, in Zoom, you can also create virtual breakout rooms. You can then assign your attendees to specific rooms, where they'll have access to all the audio, video, and screen-sharing tools and they'll be able to collaborate with all the other people in their room. At the end of your breakout session, you can bring everyone back into the main meeting room to review what each group worked on. Zoom currently allows you to split as many as 200 participants into up to 50 separate breakout rooms. Now this requires you to have the large meeting add-on to Zoom, which allows for 200 participants, but you can create breakout rooms for any number of people. First thing, you need to enable breakout rooms in your account. So here on the web dashboard, go to Settings, and under the In Meeting Advanced section, locate Breakout room, you can see I already have it enabled here. If you'd like, you can check the option here to allow hosts to preassign participants to rooms when they schedule the meeting. Now I already have the meeting in progress, so I'll open that up again, and I'll unmute my mic so everyone can hear me. Hi again, everybody. So during your meeting, when it comes time to start your individual collaborations, you can click the Breakout Rooms button. You'll want to choose the number of rooms you'd like to create. Now I only have three other people here, so I'm just going to create three rooms and put everybody into their own room for this example. You can choose how you want to assign your attendees to the room, as well. If you select Automatically, that will split everyone evenly up into the number of rooms you create. Or you can choose Manually to assign specific people to specific rooms. That way, you can make sure certain people are grouped together. I'm going to leave Automatically selected. And I'll click Create Breakout Rooms. Now this creates the rooms, but it doesn't place anyone into the rooms yet. You can see that it did distribute them into those rooms. But we also have some options down here we can take a look at. We can automatically move all participants into the breakout rooms, which you'll probably want to keep checked so they don't have to do it themselves. You can allow participants to come back into the main room at any time. I'm going to leave that unchecked so everyone has to remain in their rooms until I close the rooms out. Then you can also have the breakout rooms close automatically after a certain amount of time and you can set a countdown after closing the breakout room, so everyone can wrap up their work before the rooms close. And I can maybe adjust that just to 10 seconds for this example. Now if you've chosen to manually assign participants to the rooms, you'll see an Assign button up here next to their names, but because I have three rooms for three people, I'm not seeing that option. However, I could move people to other rooms. But in this case, I'm just going to leave everybody in their own individual rooms. We can also rename the rooms if that helps you keep track of the groups. But again, I'll just leave the defaults in this case. But when you're ready, you can choose to open all the rooms. If you didn't choose to automatically move everyone into their own rooms, you'll se a notification prompting them to join their rooms, but because I left that option checked, everybody is now in their own rooms and I'm here by myself in the main room. So while breakouts are in session, as the host, you're free to enter each breakout room to check on the attendees to see if they need anything. So I can click Join here next to Breakout Room One, and I'll choose Yes to join it. And that just takes a second, but now I'm here in the breakout room with Nick. And Nick, if you unmute, you can hear me, right? - Yeah, I hear you just fine. - Great, so while you're in a breakout room, anything you say can only be heard by the people in that room. And if I wanted to type anything in the chat area, anything I type in here will only be seen by the people in this room, even though it says Everyone here, that just means everyone in the room. And again, everyone has access to the full range of sharing tools, so they could share their screens with each other, they can work on the virtual whiteboard, and so on. Now at any time, I can go to the Breakout Rooms button again, and if I want to check on on, say, Jess, I can click Join. I'll see you in a little bit, Nick. I'll click Yes. And I've jumped into the room with Jess and now it's just me and Jess in this room. Hey, Jess. So the same things apply here. We can only see and hear the people in this room. We can only chat with the people in this room. Now we can go to the Breakout Rooms window again, and if I wanted to move people to a different room, for example, if I wanted to move Oliver into the same room with Nick, I can send him to Breakout Room One. And I can do that while I'm here talking to Jess in Breakout Room Three. Now if I do want to send a message to all the attendees, I can click Breakout Rooms to open this window again. Notice we have Broadcast a message to all. And I could type something like, 30 seconds, wrap it up, and broadcast that to the entire group. And once you're ready to close the breakout rooms and get everyone back together in the main room, click Close All Rooms. That gives them the 10-second countdown. Now if they're ready before that, they can actually now return back to the main session, which I'll do myself. And as you can see, we're now all back in the same room and we can all start discussing what we worked out in our breakout sessions. All right, so that's working with breakout rooms in Zoom.