Let Students Choose their Breakout Room

 One of the most requested features of breakout rooms is now available in Zoom, as of version 5.3: Students can now move freely among breakout rooms. You might create an activity where students need to find answers to certain questions by engaging with a number of other students one-on-one; or you modify a “speed dating” type activity, where one student remains in each breakout room and others move on their own from room to room, exchanging information; or you might assign names or topics to each breakout room and students can choose which topic they want to discuss. You still retain some oversight and can control the number of students in each room by reassigning them, but they retain the autonomy to move to a different room if they want to.

Here’s how you set this feature up:

Click the Breakout Rooms button in the menubar:

In the Breakout Rooms dialog window you now have a new option: Let participants choose room. Select that option and click “Create”

In the next dialog window click the gear icon to open the options for the breakout room:

Tick the checkbox for the first item “Allow participants to choose room.” You can set other options in this dialog window as well.

Click “Open All Rooms” to open the breakout rooms. 

Students will now have a Breakout Rooms button in their Zoom menu bar and will be invited to “Join a breakout room”:

A window opens where they can choose which room they wish to join:

To join a room they will need to hover over the blue number (indicating the number of participants already in the room).

The number changes into the word “Join." 

Clicking on the word “Join” brings up a dialog box to confirm their choice:

Selecting “Yes” opens the connection to the selected room. 

Students can call up this dialog box any time while breakouts are in session and "Join" a different room.

To label breakout rooms with names or topics, prior to opening the rooms you can “Rename” them in the Breakout Rooms dialog window. To do so, 

1. Click the word “Rename” in the line associated with the room
2. In the box enter a new title or topic. 
3. Click “Yes” to save the new name.

Now students can have a sense of the topic assigned to each room.

Allowing students to move freely from one breakout room to another reinforces student autonomy and saves a great deal of time rearranging breakout rooms so that each student has an opportunity to talk with as many others as possible. 

Note: to avoid confusion, you will need to ensure that all students have updated their Zoom application to at least version 5.3 on their devices. The current version of Zoom as of this writing is 5.4.2. One indication that they will need to upgrade is that they won't see the new "Breakout rooms" button on the Zoom menubar. If they don't see the button, you can assign them to a room manually and ask them to upgrade as soon as possible.

Let us know in the comments how this works for you.