Can I open a breakout room one at a time?

In my experience, it's all or nothing. You can "open all rooms" or "close all rooms", BUT... have you tried creating rooms one-by-one? Create one room, assign participants and open that room. Once they've moved into that room add another room and repeat. It's worth a shot.

Good question @dc4622ne!

I have the exact same question for the following reasons: my organization offers 1:1 attention from a teacher's assistant on an as-needed basis AND breaks the group up for exercises in dyads or triads, and in my experience, the 1:1 always gets interrupted by the group exercises.

Tonight, I'm going to try creating the rooms without populating them BEFORE CLASS EVEN BEGINS. I hope that will prevent anyone from even noticing that there are "open" breakout rooms.

Then, if someone asks for 1:1 attention, I can populate one with that person and the 1:1 teacher
SEPARATELY TIMED from

populating the other breakout rooms with small-group-exercise-participants when it's time.

Wish me luck.
Our material is tough and can bring up a lot of emotion in folks, so privacy and care are important.

So I'm just going to create enough rooms for the exercise an hour into the call PLUS the teacher's assistant (PLUS an extra just in case) IN ADVANCE of even opening the class, and just populate them MANUALLY at the last second.

It's silly, IMO, that any breakout has to be interrupted BEFORE I CAN EVEN BEGIN TO CREATE additional rooms.
I really don't want anyone being booted out of a private conversation into a group IN TEARS, and then landing in a new set of breakout rooms that I hastily put together in the 60 seconds I had, where I tried to put them with the same 1:1 teacher. It's so disruptive and unnecessarily stressful for them!

Thanks for asking -- sorry we don't have anything better!

Thank you so much for the help.