We are excited to share that Microsoft Teams Breakout rooms are now generally available to all of our users here at the University.

What is a breakout room?

Breakout rooms make it easy to divide your meetings into smaller groups to facilitate discussions, brainstorming sessions, or learning groups. Organisers can easily jump in between breakout rooms, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. All meeting assets, such as meeting files, whiteboards, recordings, and transcripts are available for the organiser to review and leverage.

Who can start a breakout room?

• Only the meeting organiser can start breakout rooms
• The organiser can start a breakout room in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, allowing greater flexibility on how you want to meet.

How can I use breakout rooms?

• The meeting organiser can start a breakout room on the desktop app only Participants can join a breakout room from desktop, web, or mobile.
• Microsoft Teams Rooms do not have breakout room capabilities yet.
• Participants logged in from multiple devices will have all end points join the same breakout room

How do I make sure I can start using breakout rooms?

• Make sure that the new meeting experience is enabled (Teams -> Settings -> General -> Check “Turn on new meeting experience”)
• Check and make sure you have the latest Teams updates (Update Microsoft Teams - Office Support)

I’m a Lecturer, what will my students be able to do?

• Lecturers will have the option to push students into the breakout rooms and pull them back to the main meeting, without any additional action needed by the student
• Students can be assigned to breakout rooms, join breakout rooms, use the whiteboard, or screen share if allowed to, re-join the main meeting, and see their breakout room chat
• Since breakout rooms are Teams meetings, the same permissions, options and University security policies apply to the breakout rooms.
• Learn more in this Microsoft guide to using breakout rooms.

Resources

New ways to celebrate holiday festivities with Microsoft Teams - Microsoft 365 Blog

Breakout rooms generally available in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Tech Community