EdtechGuides: Live online teaching guide: Breakout rooms

About breakout rooms

Breakout rooms in Teams and Zoom enable you to split a larger group of students into smaller groups to facilitate collaboration and discussion.

Breakout room comparison

Breakout room features
Feature	What's available in Zoom?	What's available in Teams?
Number of breakout rooms available	50* The number of breakout rooms decreases depending on the number of participants in your meeting. If you have between 201-300 attendees you can only create 30 breakout rooms.	50
Create breakout rooms	Host & Co-Host can create breakout rooms.	Meeting organiser can create breakout rooms. Meeting organiser can appoint a breakout room manager. Breakout room managers must be @city.ac.uk users who are designated presenters or co-organiser in the Teams Meeting. Only one person can manage a meeting's breakout rooms at a time.
Set up layout and activities in the breakout room in advance	Not available	Not available
Assign students to breakout rooms	Pre-assign students to breakout rooms. If students do not join with their @city.ac.uk Zoom account they will not be automatically added to the breakout room you assigned them to. Set up breakout rooms during the meeting either manually or automatically. Co-hosts are also randomly assigned to breakout rooms. Once they have joined the room they have been assigned to, they can leave the room and join other breakout rooms to support different groups of students. Set up breakout rooms for students to self-select the breakout room they want to join.	Set up breakout rooms during the meeting either manually or automatically. Reuse breakout room allocation in recurring meetings. Let people choose their rooms.
Presentation and student control in a breakout room	Security settings in the main Zoom meeting room follow through to breakout rooms. As long as enabled in the main room, students can: Use audio and webcam Chat Share screen, Annotate on screen Collaborate on Whiteboard Collaborate on files shared via OneDrive.	Students in breakout rooms become Presenters so can: Use audio and webcam Chat Screen screen Collaborate on Whiteboard Collaborate on files shared via OneDrive Record breakout room
Broadcast message to breakout rooms	Available	Available
Reopen breakout rooms during the same meeting	Available	Available

Prepare for a breakout room activity

Consider the size of the breakout rooms. You will need to ensure that all students in the breakout room have a chance to participate in the activity.
Design a lesson plan for the activities. This ensures that the activity meet learning outcomes for the session and helps you to provide meaningful instructions to the students.
Consider when during the session to run a breakout room activity.
- If using pre-assigned breakout rooms in Zoom, please note that any students who arrive after the breakout activity has started will be directed to the main room and will need to be manually assigned to the relevant breakout room. Because of this you might want to wait at least 10 minutes before you launch a breakout room activity.
Consider what outputs you want to be produced in the breakout rooms and how these could be used by students who are unable to make the synchronous sessions.
Provide clear instructions to students about what you want them to do in the breakout room activity. Include:
- Timing for the activity
- Materials students will need to work on.
- Expected outputs and how students will report back to the main room.
- Roles for different students in the breakout rooms to ensure that the activity runs smoothly.
Ensure that the activity instructions are available for students while they are in the breakout room. You can achieve this be making the activity instructions available in Moodle or a shared OneDrive file.
Remind students how they can request your help while in a breakout room.
Discuss and produce a written rules of expected behaviour for breakout rooms. Make this available on the Moodle module and draw students' attention to it.
Provide more time (an additional 10-20%) for an activity in a breakout room than you would do for a similar activity in a face-to-face situation. It can take students some time to share documents, type and annotate online.
Allocate roles in the breakout rooms (presenter and notetaker) at very least to ensure that students don’t start sharing/speaking over each other.

Further tips and ideas available from Dr Stian Reimers.

During the breakout room

Use the broadcast messages feature to provide students in breakout rooms with reminders of timings and when to move onto the next part of the activity.
Respond to requests for help from the breakout rooms, by joining the room and answering questions.
Actively move between breakout rooms to check on students’ progress and to provide advice and guidance on the activity.
Based on your observations of the breakout rooms, provide further advice and guidance to all breakout rooms by broadcasting a message to all rooms.