Forum Discussion
Breakout Rooms for Microsoft Teams
Jeffrey Allen there is a roundabout way to do with as many breakout rooms / small groups as you want, but it must be set up in advance. I made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo6yqh7erEY&hd=1 aimed at teachers, but I've included the steps below too.
- In the Team where you want breakout rooms, create a new Channel for each breakout room.
- Open the Outlook desktop app, click into the Calendar, and then click 'New Teams Meeting' to generate a link to a new video chat.*
- Copy the 'Join Microsoft Teams Meeting' link from the Calendar invite, and paste it into the first channel / breakout room.**
- Repeat this same procedure for each breakout room / channel. It's important to generate new links for each group, or else everyone will end up in the same video chat.
- The teacher / owner of the Team can see all of the private channels and enter any breakout room they want.
Some caveats: this creates the video call as a 'Chat'--the video calls aren't being hosted within the Team itself. So any transcript of the meeting conversation will live inside the 'Chat' (not in the 'Team' itself). Additionally, while it's possible to re-use the same breakout rooms, I think anyone who has ever entered the room at any time (a) will always have access to it from the Chat tab (even if you have removed them from the private Channel), and (b) may get notifications showing the text conversations (even if you have removed them from the private Channel).
*We don't have Exchange Online accounts, but if you do, I believe step 2 can be achieved more easily without exiting Teams by clicking on the 'Meeting' button from the left-side toolbar.
**I find that it works best to paste the link into a new conversation. I tried creating a new Website tab at the top of the Channel and pasting the link, but this added some steps. When I clicked the link from the Website tab, it opened the meeting in my web browser, and then I had to click 'Open in Desktop App' (or something along those lines) before being brought into the video chat. Oddly, the only method that automatically loaded the video chat in the desktop app was pasting the link into a new conversation.
Yeah it's done now but you really have to hand hold people to get to them, when to come back to the main room, can't assign and change participant to B/O rooms easily and quickly - on the go (ie not pre-assigned). Anyway, yes, we have them and guess it's constantly being updated anyway FlorianKurrle
Helen Blunden, as far as I know official breakout rooms haven't rolled out yet. Are you seeing them in preview or talking about something else?
- Ja, ich warte noch auf das offizielle Rollout!
@Jeffrey Allen No not at all. I haven't seen (or dabbled with) anything. Although did you see Jeff Teper's tweet this morning? https://twitter.com/jeffteper/status/1295432950675156992
In a previous life I was a virtual facilitator and used software such as Webex and Adobe Connect to run virtual classrooms pre-covid and break out rooms was one critical aspect of running a class, assigning people to it, getting them to do different activities within them, popping into them easily to give feedback and then convening in main room but also for participants to share their screens and show their brainstorming to the main group. It seemed a lot seamless and easier than Teams (which I feel is still a tad 'clunky'? But it could just be me).
Recently I've seen how educators are doing it in Zoom and although not perfect, it does seem to have an overall better user experience. Of course, it also depends on the educators too on how they're seamlessly using the functions to do their lessons. I sat through a 2 hour French conversation class on Zoom yesterday which was highly interactive, totally immersive, seamless experience of breakout rooms, screen sharing, presenting content back to main room, whiteboarding that made the 2 hours seem to disappear really quickly and put us all on such a high that we were buzzing afterwards. I think that may be an indication of excellent virtual facilitation skills and ease of use of the functionality of the program.
Helen Blunden That French class sounds really fun and I've love to pick it back up! Is it open to anyone or is it associated with an institution?
It's with the Alliance Francaise in Melbourne and they're all over the world. If the quality of their instruction online is anything to go by, I've decided that I'm taking further classes with them because the standard of virtual facilitation was excellent. LeAnne_H
