Zoom Breakout Rooms are a useful tool to split a meetings participants into groups/rooms where they can have side discussions or projects, and then all be brought back into a main session whatever time the meeting host wants or has planned. The meeting host has options and control over these rooms that are covered in the "Creating Breakout Rooms During a Zoom Meeting" tutorial.
However, for classroom purposes, or any repeated meetings with the same participants in the same groups or "rooms" it might be more convenient for the meeting host to pre-assign the groups as they schedule the meeting. This way the groups/"rooms" are already set up, and the host will not have to create and assign these rooms at the start of every class.
This tutorial will show how to set up pre assigned breakout rooms and edit them as needed.
1. Meeting Host should sign into Zoom with their SSO account, either from the Zoom website or in Blackboard.
Whenever the teacher signs into Zoom for work purposes, they should always sign in using SSO, by clicking the button shown below, on the bottom left of the sign-in page.
**Note** You can NOT pre-assign breakout rooms by scheduling new meetings in the Zoom Windows app. It must be done either through the Zoom tool on Blackboard, or through Zoom Website, while logged into the host's SSO account.**
Ideally the teacher or meeting host is doing this through Blackboard, using the Zoom Tool, but if for some reason they are using the Zoom website they will be asked for a "Domain" for their SSO account. If this happens, enter "ccri" as shown below.
2. Now we want to either a) create the new re-occurring meeting, for example a teachers re-occurring class, or b) edit an already scheduled meeting to add pre-assigned breakout rooms to that meeting.
a) Once you are logged into your Zoom SSO account, either in Blackboard, or the Zoom Website Hit "Schedule New Meeting" in either the zoom tool on blackboard, or the zoom website as shown below.
b) Editing A Meeting to Add Pre-Assigned Breakout-Rooms - You can edit your meeting parameters if you have already set up your classes meetings on zoom, or any reoccuring meeting, and you want to add pre-assigned breakout rooms afterwards. You can also edit the parameters to change which participants go in which room, or create or rename breakout rooms.
In this scenario if you go to your "Meetings" section in the left sub menu as shown below, you will now see all of your upcoming meetings as shown below.
After you hit Edit on the specific meeting that you want to edit you will be shown this pop up which will ask you if you just want to edit the parameters of this single meeting/class, or all of the reoccurring meetings as shown below.
This way you can add pre-assigned breakout rooms to a specific class date, if for example you as a teacher only want to do breakout rooms in a single upcoming class, but not others.
3. Now we must enable the "Breakout Room Pre-Assign" Feature in the hidden Zoom Options.
Now that we have gotten into our meeting settings, either for a new meeting, or editing a previously scheduled meeting, we must now enable the Breakout-Room Pre Assign feature.
This feature is in the hidden "options" menu below the Audio/Video settings as shown below. Click the blue "options" word and you will see the checkbox we need pop up. Check the box as shown below that says "Breakout Room pre-assign"
**Note** - This option is not enabled by default. You must enable it by pressing "Breakout Room Pre-Assign" button as shown below.
3. Assigning Breakout Rooms by Group Name and Participants. - Now we will create the different room/group names, and assign the participants into them via their email addresses.
This is an important limitation to pre-assigning breakout rooms, as it means for this to work, students **must be signed into zoom on their SSO account.**
If they sign into the class on personal or guest accounts Zoom will not be able to recognize them and place them in their correct groups automatically. However, the teacher could still manually put the participants in their correct group after the meeting has started, but for organizational purposes it is much better to have students sign in using SSO with their official school accounts when using pre-assigned breakout rooms.
There are 2 ways to assign the room names and participants. a) Through the Zoom client itself by clicking the button "create rooms", or b) by importing a CSV file.
a) Clicking the "Create Rooms" button. If we click "Create Rooms" we are brought to a screen that looks like this where we can create and name the rooms, and assign email accounts to that room as shown in this below example.
Left Column - has the different Rooms. We add more Rooms by hitting the little + sign next to the "Rooms" title at the top of the column.
After selecting that Room in the left column, its participants show on the right column.
Right Column - you can either Rename the Room by hitting the little pen icon as shown above, and you can also Add Participants below that via their email address.
In this example I added two test email accounts into Room 1. So this way whenever the meeting host opens up breakout rooms in their Zoom class, the students who had those emails would automatically be put into the "Room 1" together.
b) Importing a CSV file. The other way to set this up is through a "CSV" file. You can create this in "Microsoft Excel" and assign the named rooms and emails as shown in this template below.
Using this template, you assign each email individually to a group name that you choose. You don't need to use the names "Room1" you can name them whatever you want. You must then export this excel file as a "CSV" file.
**Note** the two screenshots above this one show where you can import these files to, either by clicking the "Import from CSV" in the hidden options sub menu, or also in the bottom left of the "Create Rooms" window.
Doing this in either place will bring you to this screen as shown below, where you can upload the file through the browser, or just simply drag and drop it from your desktop right to the window. You can also download the CSV template shown above from this window.
