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Breakout rooms are sub rooms that can be created within a meeting or training session. They are useful for splitting a large group into smaller groups that can talk or collaborate. Breakout rooms can be used in meetings and training sessions that have 200 or fewer people. Hosts can create up to 20 breakout rooms for a single meeting or training session.
Caution: The success of breakout rooms / meeting will depend on your network. If you are on a network with low bandwidth, test, test, test prior to your meeting.
For example, if you have 20 people in a session, you can create four breakout rooms and move five attendees to each room. In the breakout rooms, the attendees can speak to each other depending on the audio configuration. They can use the Chat pod, collaborate on a whiteboard, and share their screens. The host can visit all the Breakout rooms to assist and answer questions.
When work in the breakout rooms is complete, the host can end the breakout session and return attendees to the main room. Hosts are able to share what happened in the breakout rooms with everyone. If necessary, the host can return attendees to their same breakout rooms. If you use the room again, you can also reuse the breakout room layout and content. (However, the assignment of attendees to breakout rooms is not retained.)
Audio in the breakout room is not recorded. Only the audio in the main meeting.
In the Breakout rooms, the Video pod behaves as follows:
Force Presenter View option is not available in a Breakout room.
Force Presenter View setting is preserved before and after a Breakout room is used.
Everyone goes out of the Full Screen mode when a Breakout room is started or ended.
Hosts can use the default breakout room layout or design a new layout to use specifically with breakout rooms. Create a custom breakout room layout if you want to do preparatory work before sending content and people to breakout rooms. Creating custom layouts can help meetings go faster and be better organized.
There are cases where you want to have different layouts for different breakout rooms. For example, different breakout rooms can contain different content or attendee exercises. In this case, create separate layouts for the breakout rooms and ensure that the desired layout is active when you click Start Breakouts.
You can create a breakout room during the Preparing mode, while a meeting is in-progress, without disturbing the layout of the participants. When a breakout session is started, the layout created in the Preparing mode is used.
If you want different content in each breakout room but do not require different layouts, prepare the rooms before attendees join the meeting or training session. First configure the number of breakout rooms required. Then, click Start Breakouts and move yourself from room to room, loading the required content into each Share pod. Then, end the breakouts. When attendees join and you click Start Breakouts again, the content is ready. (If necessary, you can also alter the layout and content of breakout rooms during a meeting.)
If the Host & Presenter Area is open during an Adobe Connect session, it does not close when starting a Breakout session. This allows the Hosts to retain the pods available in the POA. For example, Hosts can continue to manage the attendees and their rights in the breakout rooms from the Attendees pod.
While in a meeting or training session, hosts can create breakout rooms and send attendees into the rooms.
In the Attendees pod, choose Breakout Room View from the options menu in the upper-right corner.
Note: Only the host sees the Breakout Room View of the Attendees pod.
Manually select an attendee name in the list (Control-click or Shift-click to select multiple attendees). Then, either select Change Breakout Room from the pop-up menu, or drag attendees to a breakout room.
Automatically assign attendees to breakout rooms by clicking the Distribute (Evenly Distribute From Main button). (Attendees previously assigned to specific breakout rooms remain in those rooms.)
When the attendees are assigned to breakout rooms, you can use the Rotate button to rotate the participants among the breakout rooms in one click. Adobe Connect assigns each attendee to the next breakout room in the list.
Click Rotate on the top of the Attendees pod.
Note:
The Rotate feature is only available to Hosts in HTML Client.
In breakout room, participants need permissions to use the pods to do their work and engage with each other using the pods. Such permissions, called enhanced rights in Adobe Connect, are available by default on the Share Pod, on the Notes Pod, on the Whiteboard, on the File Share Pod, and for audio and video sharing when a breakout session starts. The permissions are restored to their previous state after a breakout room ends and everyone joins in the main meeting room.
Hosts can change these enhanced rights before starting a breakout session or during a breakout. In the latter case, to give enhanced rights move the participant to the Main Meeting, give the rights and move the participant to their breakout room. Host & Presenter Area is retained after a BOR starts. Hosts can continue to use the pods that they moved to Host & Presenter Area.
To give Enhanced Participant Rights in a breakout session, follow these steps.
Click Breakout Room View () on the top of the title bar to preview the breakout rooms. Drag the users manually to each breakout room or distribute uniformly by clicking 'Evenly Distribute by Clicking Main' ().
Follow the steps from Assign enhanced participant rights.
Note: You can give enhanced rights to only the participants and not to the Hosts and Presenters of a meeting.
In breakout rooms, attendees are automatically assigned the role of presenter. They can share their voice, share content in the Share pod, modify whiteboards and add text to the Notes pod. When attendees are returned to the main room, they revert to their prior status.
All attendees, even ones who sign in as guests, can download shared content in breakout rooms.
Attendees are placed in the breakout rooms to which they were assigned.
If you are recording a meeting or training session and send attendees to breakout rooms, the recording continues to record only the main room. Edit such a recording so that users watching the recording do not see an empty main room. For more information, see Edit a recorded meeting.
In the Attendees pod, select the breakout room that you want to rename.
To edit the name of the selected breakout room, click Edit ().
Note: The Rename feature is only available to Hosts in HTML Client.
When you rename a breakout room, all the existing pods will be automatically updated to reflect the new breakout name.
Hosts can broadcast messages to all breakout rooms. This feature can be useful if you have noticed one or more rooms have a similar question. It is a good practice to send attendees a warning message a few minutes before ending breakout sessions and returning them to the main room. This mechanism allows attendees to finish speaking, loading files and working on the whiteboard before a breakout session ends.
Click Breakout Room View () on the top of the title bar and choose Broadcast Message.
Type the message in the Broadcast Message box and then click Send.
Attendees in all rooms see the message in the center of the Adobe Connect window.
Either with or without the Host present, use the options in the Status View of the Attendees pod. For example, ask a question and ask the attendees to respond by using the status options Agree or Disagree.
For more information, see Communicate with training or meeting attendees.
Hosts in the main meeting room can see the status changes of any user in a BOR.
Hosts can conduct separate polls in each individual breakout room by placing themselves in the rooms and opening poll pods.
For general information about polling, see Polling attendees.
Attendees in breakout rooms can ask a question at any time, whether a host is in their breakout room or not.
If the Chat pod is available in the breakout room, use chat to communicate with others in your room only. You cannot chat with attendees in different breakout rooms.
For general information about using the Chat pod, see Chat in meetings.
Only hosts can end a breakout session. When breakout rooms are closed, all attendees are returned to the main meeting room.
In the Breakout Room View of the Attendees pod, click End Breakout.
After ending a breakout session, hosts can share the contents of a single breakout room with everyone in the main room.
Choose Breakout Pods from the menu at the top of the title bar.
Select a breakout room name, and then select Chat or Share.
The selected content appears in a new floating pod. The contents are view only and cannot be changed or edited.
After ending a breakout session, you can return attendees to the breakout rooms again. The configuration of rooms and assigned users remains in place for the entire meeting.
In the Attendees pod, click the Breakout Room View from the options menu in the upper-right corner.
(Optional) Add a room, delete a room, or move the attendees to different rooms.
Click Start Breakouts.
Note: In the Pods menu, pods from breakout rooms remain available until you remove them in the Attendees pod.
(Information last reviewed on 27 June 2023)