Breakout rooms in Zoom are essentially private rooms for students to work (with or without a lecturer) in groups. 

Breakout rooms provide students with additional permissions, so they can share their screens, turn on their mics, collaborate on whiteboards, etc in groups.

You could think of the equivalent of a breakout rooms in a face-to-face environment saying to students “everyone break into groups, work on this topic for 20 minutes, then we’ll all come back together to discuss”


Note: Breakout rooms can only be accessed using the Zoom desktop or mobile app. Students or staff accessing their Zoom class via the web browser will be unable to start/join a breakout room.

To create pre defined breakout rooms, see Setting up pre-defined breakout rooms in Zoom.

To create breakout rooms during a Zoom meeting, complete the following steps.

  1. During a Zoom meeting, click Breakout Rooms. If your Zoom window is small, this may be under More in the zoom menu)
  2. Select a number of rooms from the Assign n participants into n Rooms list.
  3. Select the Automatically or Manually checkboxes. If students are assigned automatically, then students will be randomly distributed across a number of rooms. Depending on the number of students and the number of rooms you assign, this will determine how many students per room (the no of students per room will be shown at the base of the popup). If students are assigned manually, you can add them to rooms one by one yourself.
  4. Click Create. Another window appears (regardless of the option you selected) where you can edit rooms and distribute students 
    5. Note: This does not mean that students are in their rooms yet.

  5. Optional: Click Add a Room to add additional rooms.
  6. Optional: Hover over a room and click Rename to rename a room.
  7. Optional: Hover over a room and click Delete Room to delete a room.
  8. Optional: Assign students to a room by moving your mouse over the Move To option to the right of their name and selecting another room.
  9. Optional: To randomly assign students again, click Recreate at the bottom of the screen, which allows you to specify a number of rooms and randomly assign students again.
  10. Click Options for additional options. The additional options include:
    1. Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically.
    2. Allow participants to return to the main session at any time.
    3. Breakout rooms close automatically after n minutes.
      1. Notify me when the time is up.
    4. Countdown after closing breakout room.
      1. Set countdown timer: n seconds.
  11. When you are happy to begin the breakout rooms, click Open All Rooms to begin.
  12. To enter a breakout room, click Join.
  13. To leave a room, click Leave Room in the lower-right corner.
  14. You can broadcast a message to all students in the breakout rooms. Click Broadcast a message to all and type your message, then click Broadcast.
  15. Click Close All Rooms to end the breakout rooms and bring all students back to the main zoom classroom.

Note: Breakout rooms are not recorded, so any critical elements in discussions with students, etc should be noted yourselves.

For more further guidelines, see the following screencast: