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Quick info on using Breakout Rooms: 

• Start by reading this Zoom Help Page about breakout rooms. The short video gives a good overview

• You can send students to breakout rooms, move them around, enter any of the rooms, and you can broadcast messages to people in the rooms. 
• Anyone not assigned to a room will remain in the "Main Room" in which the meeting started.
• Students cannot enter breakout rooms themselves, but they can leave on their own and they can ask you for help using a button in the room. 
• You can also return students to their breakout rooms manually or based on an automatic timer in the breakout rooms options.  See more below.
• Co-hosts, like a TA, CANNOT start breakout rooms or move students from one room to another.

• Once inside the rooms, students can talk and screen share without disturbing anyone else. You can’t hear what people are saying in the rooms unless you enter the rooms with them. 

• Breakout rooms are not recorded unless someone who is allowed to record (co-host or host) is in the room and records.

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Video Demo of "Breakouts" Feature

• How to access breakouts feature 
• How to create 1 or many breakout groups
• Breakout group features
• Starting and ending breakouts
• How to jump into a group breakout

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Assigning Students to Breakout Rooms 

You can easily assign students Automatically (randomly) or Manually to breakout rooms

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• Meeting participants will be invited to join breakout rooms by a screen prompt
• Once inside the rooms, students can talk, chat, and screen share without disturbing anyone else. You can’t hear what people are saying in the rooms unless you enter the rooms with them
• Students can leave breakout rooms on their own and they can ask you for help using a Help button in the room if you enable it
• Breakout rooms are not recorded unless someone who is allowed to record (co-host or host) is in the room and records
• Breakout rooms cannot be used from the Zoom mobile app

Additional Breakout Room Controls

You can return students to their breakout rooms. You can also change breakout rooms mid class, but you will have to do it manually (unless you want to do random assignments again), so this is something that you should coordinate with a helper or TA who you can make host for a while you give instructions to the class. Co-hostscannot start breakout rooms or move students from one room to another. Also, it is critical that your helper TA not leave the Zoom classroom before you are done with the breakout rooms that he or she created because that will cause those rooms to disappear.

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Experiment before you try this with a class!

Preassigned Breakout Rooms

In order to create preassigned breakout rooms in a Zoom Canvas class, two things need to be set up. First, be sure that breakout rooms are enabled for your specific class (done through Canvas) and second, edit the class in utexas.zoom.us so that preassigned Zoom breakout rooms are allowed.

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• • Note: Students must be logged in to Zoom via Canvas for the account names work correctly for pre-assigned breakout rooms. If a few people are not logged in via Canvas, they can be manually added to breakout rooms, but encourage your students to log in to Zoom via Canvas to make things easier. 

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Set a Timer for Participants in a Breakout Room Indicating When the Room Will End

Once you have begun a meeting, click the Breakout Room button on the control bar at the bottom of your meeting window. You can assign students to Breakout Rooms from there. If you click Options it will allow you to pre-determine how long your students will be in the breakout rooms. it will also give you the option to send an automated message warning all of the students that the break it is going to end. Here are the options available for a Breakout Room:

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Once the Breakout Rooms begin there is a button in the bottom left corner of the Breakout Rooms window that allows you to “Broadcast a message to all” if you would prefer to let the students know yourself.

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Pre-Assign Breakout Rooms in a Zoom Canvas Class

• Before you pre-assign students to breakouts, you have to make sure your Breakout Room setting under "In Meeting (Advanced)" on https://utexas.zoom.us/profile/setting is toggled on and that the "Allow host to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling" feature is also checked.  see below.

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• Students must be logged in to Zoom via Canvas for the account names to work correctly for pre-assigned breakout rooms. If a few people are not logged in via Canvas, they can be manually added to breakout rooms, but encourage your students to log in to Zoom via Canvas to make things easier

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Additional Zoom Resource Links on "Breakout Rooms" Features

• Getting Started with Breakout Rooms
• Managing Breakout Rooms
• Pre-Assigning Participants to Breakout Rooms

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Still need help? 

For McCombs faculty, please contact Media Services via email or phone:

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