Pre-Assigned Breakout Rooms

As a meeting host, you can split your meeting participants into breakout rooms when scheduling the meeting. This can be useful if you already know how you want to split up your participants.

Limitations

You can only pre-assign participants that have a Zoom account. They must be signed in to that Zoom account during the meeting, or they will not be automatically placed into a breakout room and must be manually assigned.
Up to 200 participants can be pre-assigned to breakout rooms.
If you scheduled recurring meetings, the pre-assigned breakout rooms will only work if it's applied to all meetings in the recurrence. You can't edit a single meeting in the recurrence and apply a unique pre-assignment.

Pre-assigning participants to breakout rooms using the web portal

Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
Click Meetings and schedule a meeting.
In the Meeting Options section, select Breakout Room pre-assign and click Create Rooms.
Click the plus button beside Rooms to add more breakout rooms.
Hover over the default breakout room name in the right panel and click the edit button to rename it.
In the Add participants text box, search for internal (Fuller faculty & staff accounts) participants by name or email address, or manually enter the email address of external users, and then press Enter to to add them to the breakout room.
(Optional) Use these options to edit your breakout rooms and participants:
- Click and drag a participant's email address to change the order.
- Hover over a participant's name to see options to move them to another room or remove them from the current room.
- To delete a breakout room, hover the room name in the left panel and click the trash icon .
Click Save.

Pre-assigning participants to breakouts rooms using a CSV file

Useful when assigning large amounts of participants, or when you already have a list in a spreadsheet format.

Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
Click Meetings and schedule a meeting.
In the Meeting Options section, select Breakout Room pre-assign and click Import from CSV.
Click download to download a sample CSV file you can fill out.
Open the CSV file with spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel.
Fill in the Pre-assign Room Name column with the breakout room name, and the Email Address column with the assigned participant's email address.
Save the file.
Drag and drop the file in the web portal.

Editing breakout rooms assignment

If you have already pre-assigned participants to breakouts rooms, you can edit the assignments before you start the meeting.

You can also manage pre-assigned breakout rooms during the meeting.

Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
Click Meetings and click the meeting you want to edit.
In the Breakout Room section, click View detail.
Edit the breakout rooms as needed. See the previous section for more details.
Click Save.

Starting a meeting with pre-assigned breakout rooms

Start the meeting with participants pre-assigned to breakout rooms.
Click Breakout Rooms in the meeting controls to access the breakout rooms you created.
Note:
- If a participant is not automatically assigned to the breakout room you specified when scheduling the meeting, recover to pre-assigned breakout rooms to re-assign participants to their pre-assigned breakout rooms.
- You can manually assign participants using the in-meeting breakout room controls.
- You may also Recreate the breakout rooms for this meeting if you prefer to automatically or manually assign them, instead of using the pre-assigned ones.
Click Open All Rooms to start the breakout rooms.

Recovering to pre-assigned breakout rooms

After starting the breakout rooms, you can recover to the breakout rooms assignment you previously specified. This can be useful if you changed your breakout rooms during the meeting. For example, you could use random breakout rooms for the first half of class, and pre-assigned rooms for the second half.

Start the meeting with participants pre-assigned to breakout rooms.
Click Close All Rooms to end all breakout rooms.
Click Recreate then Recover to pre-assigned rooms.
Participants will be re-organized into the breakout rooms you specified when scheduling the meeting.

Learn more about managing breakout rooms.