Managing Breakout Rooms

Owned by Nate St George (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Feb 06, 2024 by Kimberley Barker
2 min read

This article describes how you can create and manage breakout rooms in a Zoom meeting.

What are Breakout Rooms?

Breakout rooms are a Zoom feature that allows you to split your meeting into up to 50 smaller sessions.

Why Would I Use Breakout Rooms?

Breakout rooms are useful for group discussions within a class, or to allow groups to discuss assignments.

Each breakout room has the full audio, video, and screen share feature set of a normal Zoom meeting. Meeting hosts can pop in and out of meeting rooms to check in on a group’s progress or whenever they call on the host for help.

Creating Breakout Rooms

  1. Start your meeting.

  2. In the bottom toolbar, click Breakout Rooms.

  3. Select the number of rooms to create and how to assign users to each room:

    1. Automatically: Evenly distribute users into rooms randomly

    2. Manually: Choose which users to place in each room.

  4. Click Create Rooms.

  5. The rooms will be created, but users will remain in the main room. To immediately begin the breakout room session, click Open All Rooms in the breakout room window.

Breakout Room Options

Once breakout rooms have been created, additional options become available for further tuning of how you want the rooms to behave. These can be accessed by clicking Options in the breakout room window. The following options will appear:

  • Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically: If this option is checked, Zoom will automatically move all users into their predetermined rooms. If this is not checked, users will have to click Join to join the breakout room.

  • Allow participants to return the main room at any time: If this option is checked, participants will have a button in their meeting controls that allows them to return to the main room. Otherwise, the host will need to end the breakout rooms for the participants to return to the main room.

  • Breakout rooms close automatically after: X minutes: If this option is checked and a minute value is entered, the breakout rooms will automatically close and move users back into the main room after the specified amount of time You can also select Notify me when time up to get a notification when users are returned to the main room.

  • Countdown after closing breakout room: If this option is checked, users will see a countdown timer before they are returned to the main room.