Breakout Rooms Best Practices for Hosts

Prior to your meeting:
Thoroughly plan breakout room activities PRIOR to creating the rooms. Ask yourself: “What is the expected outcome from these breakout rooms.”

Design room layouts and upload content

• When you create a meeting room, there are no breakout rooms. The first time you activate the breakout rooms, they will be patterned after the current main room layout. To avoid having to customize each breakout room individually, arrange the layout of the main room the way you want it prior to creating the breakout rooms. Once the breakout rooms are created, any changes to the layouts will have to be done room by room. Each breakout room can be unique.
• A Host should prepare breakout rooms prior to the breakout room sessions by uploading files, adding a breakout room Chat Pod, Note Pod, File Share Pod, Poll Pod, Web Links Pod, or creating a Share Pod for sharing documents, computer screens or whiteboards. Although participants will be promoted to the role of Presenter when they enter the room, they do not have permissions to create new Pods. They only have accesses to those Pods or tools which are made available by the Host(s).
• Develop a Communication Strategy. Probably one of the most difficult aspects of managing breakout rooms in Adobe Connect is developing a communication strategy. Hosts are able to move between rooms to see how students (participants) are progressing with assignments as well as to interact and answer questions. But, you can only be in one place at a time, so you will need a strategy for handling questions from students (participants), no matter which breakout room you are in.

Options for Communication in Breakout Rooms:

Chat popup notification

One option is to place a chat pod in each breakout room and have the students chat specifically with the Host(s) or use the “Contact Hosts” bar in the lower right corner of the screen. The messages pop up on the Hosts screen, no matter which breakout room (or main room) the Host is in.

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Contact Hosts Text Bar

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Pop Up Message to Host

The disadvantages are that these messages only stay on the screen for a couple of seconds and there is no way to respond directly to the messages. If the Host doesn’t have a chance to read the message as soon as it pops up, or if several messages are sent at the same time and the Host can’t read them fast enough, the messages are lost. The only way for the Host to view the messages again and respond is to enter the breakout room the message was sent from and read the Chat pod. Only messages sent from the Chat pod will be recorded. Messages sent using the “Contact Hosts” bar are not recorded anywhere.

Emoticons
Another option is to have students (participants) use emoticons to communicate with the Host. The emoticons are visible to Hosts in both the Attendee List pod in the main room and the Breakout Rooms pod (visible by the Host from all rooms). For example, Hosts could have students (participants) use the raised hand emoticon to indicate that they have a question and the Host will be able to see the signal no matter which room he/she is in. The Host still has to enter the breakout room to find out what the question is, but at least messages won’t get lost if multiple students (participants) raise their hands at the same time.

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Raised Hand Emoticon Shown in Attendee List Pod

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Raised Hand Emoticon Shown in Breakout Rooms Pod

Shared Note and Chat pods
Breakout rooms can have note and chat pods that are both exclusive to each room as well as shared across rooms. To create a shared pod:

1. Create it in the main room first before activating the breakout rooms.

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   Step 1: Create a New Chat Pod in Main Meeting

2. Name the Chat Pod so you can identify it later.

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   Step 2: Rename Chat Pod

3. Activate the breakout rooms.

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   Step 3: Activate Breakouts

4. Enter each room, and add the pod to the layout.

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   Step 4: Add Chat Pod in Breakout Room

You will be able to differentiate between the Shared Pods and a non-shared pod because the Shared Pods will be a slight shade of gray. Pod messages and content entered into the pods is visible to everyone, no matter which room they are in.

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Gray-Shaded Chat Pod

During your meeting:

• If you have multiple Hosts in the meeting, make sure you have clearly designated responsibilities. All Hosts in the room will be able to manage breakout rooms.
• Assign group leaders prior to sending Students (participants) to breakout rooms. Make sure group leaders know what they are to do. Answer any questions while everyone is together in the main room. Once Students (participants) have been sent to breakout rooms it will be more difficult and time consuming to answer general questions.
• Make sure students (participants) understand exactly what they are to do in the breakout rooms
• Make sure students (participants) know how much time they have to complete the activity.
• A Host should frequently drop in and out of the breakout rooms to observe participants’ collaboration, answer questions, and interact with participants.
• The Host should send a warning message to all breakout rooms notifying all Attendees that the breakout session is about to end. Allow enough time for Attendees to wrap up their discussions and activities.

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  Host Announcement

Breakout Rooms Tips

• Files previously uploaded to Share pods in the main room aren’t always available in the breakout rooms – not sure if it’s a bug or a feature that some rooms could access all of the uploaded files and some couldn’t. If the entire list of uploaded files was available, it had to be accessed from the “Share” button at the bottom of the Share pod as there is no scroll bar for the list and you can only access the files whose names are visible. It seems like content typically has to be uploaded separately to each breakout room.
• Files in the Shared content area as well as in your personal content folder are available to be uploaded into Share pods in the breakout rooms.

  Note: Only users with a meeting creator license will have a content folder.

• Using Video in breakout rooms - There were performance and quality issues with full motion Flash video in the breakout rooms just as there is in the main room. There were also problems with Presenter and SWF files loading in the breakout rooms. If you are going to have students (participants) complete a Presenter presentation or watch an animation or video as part of a breakout room activity, if at all possible, have them watch it together in the main room before moving them to breakout rooms.
• After giving instructions to participants about the breakout rooms, wait 5-10 seconds before moving users to their breakout rooms. Due to network latency, the last couple of seconds of your audio may not arrive immediately after your speak. This will give the network time to deliver your last sentences, especially if this was important information or instructions for the users.

General Breakout Room Information

When using breakout rooms, meeting rooms are limited to 50 Attendees. You can have up to 5 breakout rooms for any single meeting.

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Create Breakout Rooms

Use the “Add Breakout” button to create a new breakout room, and use the “Remove Breakout x” to delete unwanted breakout room(s).

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Delete Breakout Rooms

All participants are automatically promoted to the role of Presenter when placed in breakout rooms. The Presenter role gives participants the right to broadcast their video and voice in the Camera and Voice pod, to share their files, computer screens or whiteboard in the Share pod, to chat in the Chat Pod, to add content to the Note Pod, to cast a poll in the Poll Pod, and so forth. When participants are returned to the main meeting room, they will be reverted to their prior role.

When using the “Breakouts Active” button to dismiss breakout sessions, the participant assignments to each breakout room will be preserved. The Host can then click the “Begin Breakouts” button to send all participants back to the same breakout rooms.

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Breakouts Active

All information about the participant assignments in breakout rooms will be deleted if the Host uses “Return All To Main Meeting” option under the “Breakout Options” menu to end the breakout sessions. (For more information, see the section on Pod Options.)

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Return All to Main Meeting

A Host will be able to pull in content from breakout rooms to the main meeting room and share it with the whole group to explain the breakout exercises in the reunited main meeting session. To share content from the breakout rooms, a Host should first select an individual breakout room name from the Breakout Pods under the Pods menu, and then choose the pod(s) to share with all participants. The selected pod(s) will appear in a new view-only floating pod in the main meeting room.

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Share Breakout Pods in Main Meeting

You can automatically assign participants to breakout rooms or you can add them to specific breakout rooms manually.

1. After opening Breakout rooms, click on the “Assign” button in the Breakout Rooms pod.
2. Click “Evenly Distribute From Main”

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Assign Participants to Breakout Rooms

For effective discussions, divide participants into groups of 5 or less if possible.
As participants are transitioned into their breakout rooms, the microphones and speakers for the main room are automatically muted.
Phone bridges only work in breakout rooms if the phone conferencing system you are using is specifically designed to provide separate channels for breakout rooms. Otherwise everyone still hears everyone else even though they have been sent to separate breakout rooms.

Uses for breakout rooms
Use breakout rooms for:

• brainstorming activities
• tutoring
• small group activities and collaboration
• troubleshooting technical problems so the whole group is not held up. If you have a facilitator or moderator for your meeting or training, have that person move the participant to a breakout room
• Discussing assigned topics from the instructor or host
• Working on a specific group projects or assignments
• Working in a ‘lab environment’

Host Options in Breakout Rooms

NOTE: The breakout rooms pod options are available only when the rooms are not active.

Return All to Main Meeting option: When participants are assigned to breakout rooms, they will continue to be assigned to the same room throughout the class or meeting session. You can alternate between having everyone in the Main room and sending everyone to breakout rooms and still maintain the same group structure. If you want to change the way the participants are divided into groups, use the “Return All to Main Meeting” option to quickly remove all participants from the breakout rooms so they will be reassigned.

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Return All to Main Meeting

Clear All Rooms: To remove all rooms and save the pods, such as Whiteboard or Chat, created within the rooms, click the pod options button and select Clear All Rooms. The pods are saved under the Breakout Pods menu option. Numbering of any subsequently created rooms continues from the number of the last created room.

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Clear All Rooms

Reset Rooms: To remove all breakout rooms, the breakout room pods, and pods saved under the Breakout Pods menu option, click the Pod Options button and select Reset Rooms. This also resets room numbering.

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Reset Rooms

Recording Breakout Rooms

If you wish to record meeting activities in a meeting, only activities that happen in the main meeting room will be recorded. If you want to record individual breakout rooms, you will need to use a screen capture application like Camtasia.

Using Audio in breakout rooms

VoIP (audio through Adobe Connect) automatically follows users into breakout rooms.

• When you move users from the main room to a breakout room, the users’ microphone and speakers are automatically muted in the main room.
• When users enter a breakout room, their microphone is muted but their speakers are unmuted/enabled.
• When a user exits from a breakout room, their microphone and speakers remain muted in the main room. They must unmute their speakers to hear and unmute their microphone to speak in the main room.