Conducting Zoom office hours with breakout rooms

When conducting office hours with Zoom, Breakout Rooms can be used as an effective tool to manage students and ensure private one-on-one conversations. The following tips will help you to be successful in scheduling and conducting office hours with Zoom:

Step 1: Schedule a meeting during the times that you wish to hold the session and join as you would a normal meeting. In this meeting, you will use breakout rooms to assign each student to a private room, and then move between the rooms to answer questions privately.

Step 2: Click on the “Breakout Rooms” option on the bottom of your Zoom menu. Create more rooms as there are students, and select “Manually” as the breakout rooms type:

Screen capture of the Create Breakout Rooms interface in Zoom. An arrow is pointing at the Breakout Rooms icon, and the option for manually assign participants is toggled on and circled. 
[Figure 1] Screen capture of the Create Breakout Rooms interface in Zoom. An arrow is pointing at the Breakout Rooms icon, and the option for manually assign participants is toggled on and circled.

Step 3: When students join your Zoom session, you will be able to assign them to their private breakout rooms. To assign a student to a breakout room, simply click on “Assign” next to each room and put a checkmark next to a student name.

Screen capture of the breakout room with the Assign link activated and two names listed in a fly-out interface to be assigned into that room. 
[Figure 2] Screen capture of the breakout room with the Assign link activated and two names listed in a fly-out interface to be assigned into that room.

Step 4: To add a room, click “Add a Room” at the bottom of the window. Then click on “Open All Rooms”

Note: You may add a few extra rooms for students who join the office hours later or reuse the breakout room after one student leave the meeting. There can be up to 50 Breakout rooms in a meeting.

Screen capture of the breakout rooms control interface with arrows pointing at the Add a Room button and the Open All Rooms button. 
[Figure 3] Screen capture of the breakout rooms control interface with arrows pointing at the Add a Room button and the Open All Rooms button.
Step 5: Now you can join each breakout room in turn by clicking on “Join” next to the breakout room. You can use the “Broadcast a message to all” option to send a message to all rooms
Screen capture of the breakout rooms interface with two breakout rooms listed, and ‘Join’ links adjacent to each room. There is also a ‘Broadcast a message to all’ option shown in the interface. 
[Figure 4] Screen capture of the breakout rooms interface with two breakout rooms listed, and ‘Join’ links adjacent to each room. There is also a ‘Broadcast a message to all’ option shown in the interface.
Step 6: After you join a breakout room, the breakout rooms panel will be minimized. To manage the rooms, click on the “Breakout Rooms” icon again from the bottom menu. The red circle icon with a number indicating you have a new student join the meeting and waiting to be assigned to a breakout room.
] Screen capture of the breakout rooms option in the Zoom interface with a numbered red flag indicating the number of students waiting to be assigned to a breakout room. 
[Figure 5] Screen capture of the breakout rooms option in the Zoom interface with a numbered red flag indicating the number of students waiting to be assigned to a breakout room.
Step 7: Students who join in the meeting after the rooms are created will show under the “Unassigned” list. Hover over the student name, click on “Assign to” to assign the student to a room.
Screen capture of the breakout rooms interface with a student listed under the ‘Unassigned’ section. An arrow is pointing to the ‘Assign To’ option, that has a flyout menu that lists each breakout room. 
[Figure 6] Screen capture of the breakout rooms interface with a student listed under the ‘Unassigned’ section. An arrow is pointing to the ‘Assign To’ option, that has a flyout menu that lists each breakout room.

Note: if the student joins in without signing in to their University Zoom account, they may be held in the waiting room.

Additional information on breakout rooms can be found in the Zoom documentation.