Break out rooms - assigning people randomly

[SA14]

If you are assigning random break outs more than once in a meeting, does zoom send the same people into the same room each time? 

[Ray_Harwood · Accepted solution]

When you open the "same" rooms in a Zoom Meeting Breakout Session, it remembers where people were originally, and put them back in the same rooms.  The rationale is that often the host/moderator wants the same group of people to talk initially, come back to the main room for a group discussion, and then go back into the Breakout Rooms with the same people that were previously together, to continue their discussion.

If this is not what you want, click the "Recreate" button at the bottom of the Breakout Rooms window, and Zoom will start "fresh" with no room assignments, and if you select the Automatically Assign People to Rooms option, it will re-randomize the assignments.

[SA14]

Thanks a lot for the information! 

[debrac]

Thanks Ray for the info we definitely want people to be put in rooms with new people. We have meetings of 70 people, with 7 people assigned as facilitators to facilitate the breakout rooms. We do 3-4 breakouts in a meeting. So what we would like to happen is have a moderator assigned to each room with new people each time. Is this possible?

Thanks,

Debra

[actuality]

Hi

I am needing to use the breakout rooms for the following and wanting to know if the random assign function will work.

Its a group of 20 people. They are in pairs in a breakout room for 6 minutes and then they need to be shuffled to be with a new partner. 

Will the random assign function ensure that every round they are with someone they havent already been with until everyone has had a chance to be with everyone. Like a round robin tournament.

Thanks Shannon

[caoimhinsmo]

I very badly need the very same thing.  Even if Zoom could avoid putting people with someone they had just been with last time, that would be good.

And even if Zoom did proper randomization when you ask it to recreate the breakout rooms, I think that would be better than what it does at present.  I am not sure, but I suspect that Zoom polls the clients and fills up the breakout rooms on basis of who is first to respond, so that if certain people have computers which are a bit slow, they tend to end up together again in the last breakout rooms to be created.

[Ray_Harwood]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @caoimhinsmo.

Honestly, I’ve never tested the outcome of Breakout Room assignments to see if there is a visible pattern.

I know that manual Breakout Room assignment can be done quite easily for small groups, but once the number of attendees gets much above 20-25, the complexity truly is exponentially more difficult. I think the issue for Zoom is that there are requests for many different assignment schemes, probably too many to accommodate in the Zoom client.

What I’d rather see from Zoom is a way to download an attendee list from the live meeting with names and internal attendee ID numbers, allow a Host the ability to re-order them offline and upload the next assignment list. The current method of pre-assigning uses the email address of the user’s Zoom account, and this fails to assign people that don’t log in to the known email address. It’s complex, for sure.

Sorry I can’t provide you a more positive answer!

[caoimhinsmo]

I have been keeping track over the last few weeks. (I run a language learners’ practice group each Wednesday with about 20 students, and I reassign them in pairs into different breakout rooms every 5 or 10 minutes.)  And I have become more and more convinced that when asked to recreate breakout rooms, Zoom polls the users and puts the first to respond into the first room, last to respond into the last room.  Or something like that.  Because the same people, with the slowest computers or connections always seem to end up together again at the bottom of the list of rooms.  It’s a big problem for me and forces me to read out the names each time and swap students manually if they have been together before.  I would be very happy if Zoom would truly randomize the list of participants.  Happier still if it could remember who was with whom last time and avoid putting them together again.

[techhost]

We have a daily meeting with approx 300 participants. We use breakout rooms of approx 30 people per room. Even though the breakout rooms are re-created daily by different "Hosts" using different computers in different countries, people are generally landing in the same rooms with the same people. We are getting complaints that this is not a random assignment, which devalues our credibility of stating that it is random. It would be great if Zoom can look into this and create a fix in the next update please!