Save and Reuse Breakout Room Configurations

Question

I regularly host online teaching sessions on Zoom and make extensive use of breakout rooms, where students work together in smaller groups.

Students sometimes ask to remain in the same breakout-room group across multiple teaching sessions. At present, when a new session takes place on a different day, I need to keep a separate record of the previous group composition and then manually recreate the breakout rooms and reassign each student to the correct room. This can be quite time-consuming, particularly with larger classes.

It would be very useful if Zoom provided a feature that allowed a host to save a breakout-room configuration — including the room names and participant assignments — and then reuse that configuration in a future meeting.

For example, when creating breakout rooms, the host could be given an option such as “Save breakout room configuration”. In a subsequent meeting, the host could select “Use saved configuration”, choose the appropriate saved configuration, and have Zoom automatically recreate the rooms and assign returning participants to their previous groups.

This would be particularly valuable for lecturers, trainers, facilitators and others who conduct recurring sessions in which participants need to work in consistent groups over an extended period.

Don.z · Answer

Hello​@larasuddes,Thanks for reaching out! The workflow you describe is already possible in Zoom through saved breakout-room assignments.You can save the room names and participant assignments and reuse them in a future session, so you don’t need to manually recreate the groups each time.To save a setup:Create your breakout rooms and assign participants, but don’t open the rooms yet.In the Breakout Rooms window, click (…)Select Save Breakout Rooms.Name the configuration and click Save.When you meet again, you can use that saved configuration to recreate the groups rather than starting over.A couple of things to keep in mind: this works with recurring meetings that have a fixed recurrence pattern, but not recurring meetings with no fixed time. Each user can also save up to 10 breakout-room assignments.For additional context, you can also review our article on Managing meeting breakout rooms in Zoom EventsHopefully this helps with the recurring-group scenario you described.

Save and Reuse Breakout Room Configurations

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