How to Manage and Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom

Because of the Covid-19, remote working has become more and more popular all over the world. While speaking of working at home, you surely know some video conference software like Zoom, which is one of the most popular programs. It helps you stay connected wherever you work. 

If you are a leader, you may often need to gather your staff to exchange ideas. Sometimes, you might want to group particular people into teams to concentrate on different topics. At that time, you can try the Breakout Rooms in Zoom, which lets you separate participants into small groups. If you don't know how to do breakout rooms in Zoom, stick around here to find the solution!

What is Zoom Breakout Room

As its name indicates, the Breakout room is the way to break a large meeting into small meetings to concentrate on different topics in Zoom. 

Zoom allows you to split the large meeting into up to 50 small sessions automatically or manually if you are the host. Besides, you can flexibly switch participants between sessions.

The good:

• Every participant has full video, audio, and screen share capabilities
• You can move around participants freely
• spur participants discourse

How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom on Windows/Mac

Actually, it is straightforward to make a breakout room in Zoom. All you need to do is to enable the function and follow the below tutorial to get it down. But before that, you need to make sure that:

• Use the desktop version
• You are the host 

Stage 1. Enable the Breakout Room

Step 1. Go to Zoom's official website, and sign in to your account.

Step 2. Once signed successfully, click "My Account" in the top-right corner. Next, select the "Settings" option under the Personal tab on the left pane.

Step 3. In the Meeting tab, click "In Meeting (Advanced). Then find the Breakout Room icon, and toggle the switch to the right to turn it on. Finally, the Breakout Room feature is enabled successfully, and you can create Zoom Breakout Rooms based on your needs.

Stage 2. Do Breakout Rooms in Zoom

Step 1. Launch the Zoom application on your PC or Mac.

Step 2. You can choose to start an instant or scheduled meeting by clicking "New Meeting" or "Schedule". Make sure that you are the host, or you cannot make breakout rooms.

Step 3. When the meeting begins, click "Breakout Rooms" on the lower right corner of the screen.

Step 4. Select the number of rooms you want to create, and the participants to the rooms. Here you can choose the way you like to assign the participants:

• Automatically: Zoom will split your participants up evenly into each of the rooms
• Manually: Choose which participants you would like in each room

Step 5. Then click "Create Breakout Rooms". After you have created the rooms, you can still move around participants.

How to Manage Breakout Rooms in Zoom

Now, you have learned the way to make breakout rooms in Zoom; however, you may have some difficulty managing these Zoom breakout rooms. So, in the following, we will provide you with a detailed guide to managing the breakout room in Zoom:

Step 1. You can see all the breakout rooms. Also, you can hover over to move, rename, reassign, and delete people from various rooms.

Step 2. For advanced settings, you can find them in the "Option" tab:

• Set breakout rooms to close after the time you set
• Decide how much control you want participants to have in these sessions
• Set a countdown timer 

Bonus Tip: How to Record Zoom Meeting Without Permission

Whether you are in a Breakout Room meeting or a large Zoom meeting, you might want to record the meetings for later checking or viewing. Although the recording feature is available in Zoom, you can do it only when you get the host's permission. Or you may want to record Zoom meetings without others knowing. Given that, a powerful Zoom meeting recording app would be helpful.

EaseUS RecExperts is such a program that lets you record Zoom meetings without permission. In addition, it also helps you record Microsoft teams meeting, Google meet, Webex meeting, etc. It performs perfectly in recording live streaming videos with the original quality and then exporting them in various formats.

The benefits:

• Record screen flexibly, like full screen, partial screen, etc.
• Allow capturing screen, webcam, and audio simultaneously
• Start, stop and split your recordings automatically
• Provide some editing tools

Here's how to record a Zoom meeting without permission:

Step 1. Go to the meetings that you want to record. Then, launch EaseUS RecExperts on your devices. Choose the "Full Screen"  recording mode or select the recording area in the "Region" mode.

Step 2. Choose to record the system sound, microphone sound or none by clicking on the according buttons. When it's time to start recording, click on the red "REC" button to begin.

Step 3. If you need to pause the recording, click on the white double vertical bar. To end the recording, click on the red square sign. You can also use the hotkeys "F10" and "F9" to pause or stop recording.

Step 4. After recording, you can view the meeting videos in the pop-up recording list.