How to do breakout rooms in Zoom

The ability to divide a virtual meeting into 50 separate rooms is a powerful and flexible capability. If your work involves virtual training, focus groups, or other intensive online conferencing, it’s essential to know how to do breakout rooms in Zoom. You can set them up in advance while scheduling, or start and end them and control their parameters from inside the meeting. Here is how to do breakout rooms in Zoom.

Read more: How to mute or unmute yourself on Zoom

Enabling Zoom breakout rooms

Direct your browser to the Zoom web portal and sign in to your account. Click Settings–>In Meeting (Advanced).

On the In Meeting (Advanced) page, you should see Breakout rooms and a switch to the right. Flip the switch on to enable breakout rooms for your account.

When you switch breakout rooms on, a menu will drop down with choices for you to make about what abilities you, as the host, will have regarding your rooms. You can allow yourself to assign participants to meetings when scheduling, broadcast messages across the various rooms, and see participant activity inside each room. Make your choices and click Save. Now you can add breakout rooms to your Zoom meetings.

How to make a breakout room in Zoom

You can set up breakout rooms from within your meeting by clicking the Breakout Rooms button at the bottom of the screen.

A window will allow you to choose the number of breakout rooms and the method for assigning participants before clicking the Create button.

You can also create breakout rooms in advance of the meeting when you scheduled it — if you gave yourself that capability when you enabled breakout rooms. You will need to use the web portal to do this. The Breakout Room pre-assign button will be in the Options drop-down when you schedule the meeting.

Managing your rooms

Once your breakout rooms are created, you can control various options about participant access and timeout options.

As a host, you have the option of entering any breakout room.

Once the rooms have been opened, you can rename a room, delete empty rooms, add a room, send messages to the breakout rooms, and close the rooms (there will be a 60-second countdown). This is accomplished via the Breakout rooms window.