Zoom Breakout Rooms

During a class meeting, Zoom allows your instructor (the host) to split students into separate breakout rooms for small group projects and discussions. This allows students to meet in smaller groups, allowing for independent sessions of interaction and collaboration that are separate from the main Zoom meeting, and can still be supervised by the instructor.

Breakout Management

Your instructor might manually sort students into groups or split the class randomly. As the host, an instructor has the ability to create breakout rooms, assign students, and manage the rooms. The host can switch between rooms at any time, broadcast messages to all the room, and end the breakout sessions. 

Breakout Session Recording

Breakout room participants have full audio, video, and screen share capabilities. The host in the main meeting will only receive the main recording - they must assign students as co-hosts to record each breakout room if they wish. Once in the rooms, the co-hosts can then start the recording of those sessions; when the meeting ends, the breakout session recordings will save locally to each co-host’s machine, accessible via their Zoom app or directly in their file system. The host in the main meeting will still receive the main recording, in the cloud or locally, as chosen.

Limitations

Participants joining the meeting from a mobile device cannot record meetings. Users joined into the Zoom meeting from the Zoom Mobile App or H.323/SIP (VoIP) devices can participate in breakout rooms, but cannot manage them. Users joined via the web client, Chromebooks/Chrome OS or Zoom Rooms are unable to join Breakout Rooms, but the main room can be used as an alternative session for these users.

Further information on participating in breakout rooms is available at the Zoom Help Center Links to an external site.. 

---

If you need immediate assistance, please feel free to reach out to Learning Environments:

713-348-4357 | teaching@rice.edu