Breakout rooms in a webinar

Breakout rooms are small video calls that a live webinar's attendees go into and come back from to the stage. Each room holds up to 8 attendees, and a webinar can have up to 20 rooms. Rooms are not recorded.

Hosts, co-hosts, moderators and team admins run the rooms from the webinar's live page (see Host a webinar).

Add rooms

On the webinar's page, Add room in the Breakout rooms band adds a room with a name. Rename a room where its name is shown, and Remove room takes it off. On the live page, Add room in the rooms view adds one during the webinar. A room added while the rooms are open opens the next time you open them.

The rooms view

Stage and Rooms, under the stage on the live page, switch between the stage and the rooms view. The switch changes only your own page: attendees still see the stage. The rooms view lists the rooms. Before the webinar is live it says Rooms can be opened once the webinar is live.

Choose how attendees go into rooms

While the webinar is live and the rooms are closed, How attendees go into rooms offers three ways. Only attendees watching the stage go into rooms: the people running the webinar stay backstage, and an attendee presenting on the stage stays on it.

• Spread evenly: the attendees watching are spread over the rooms as evenly as the rooms allow. When the rooms cannot hold everyone, the first to register go into them. Shuffle attendees spreads them again in a random order. The line under the choice says how many will go into how many rooms, and how many will stay on the stage when the rooms cannot hold everyone.
• Placed by a host: each room lists the names placed in it, and The stage lists the attendees in no room. Move someone with Move to… beside their name, which lists the other rooms and The stage, or drag the name to another room.
• Chosen by each attendee: attendees choose a room themselves when the rooms open, from a list on their stage, which marks a room that is Full.

Timer is the minutes before the rooms close by themselves, 1 to 120. Leave it empty for no timer.

Open the rooms

Select Open rooms. When the rooms cannot hold everyone watching, it asks first and says how many will stay on the stage.

Each attendee in a room will see Joining and the room's name, with a 10-second count, and then join the room. In a room, attendees see and hear each other, with their camera and microphone off until they turn them on, and the chat is the room's own. A screen shared in a room is shown in that room only.

The stage stays live while the rooms are open: anyone on it stays on it, and the recording goes on filming the stage. While nobody is on the stage, the recording shows Attendees are in breakout rooms.

While the rooms are open

The rooms view says the time left, or No timer, and each room shows how many are in it out of how many it holds, with their names.

• Join room on a room takes you into it, with your camera and microphone as they were, and you hear that room only. Leave the room brings you back with them as they were before. While you visit a room and are on the stage, your status line says Your stage microphone is off.
• Message every room sends a message of up to 500 characters with Send to every room. It appears at the top of every room's stage, with your name.
• Move to… beside an attendee's name, then a room or The stage, or dragging the name, moves them there at once.

Your Chat tab stays the stage's chat while you visit a room. Each room's chat can be read in the report after the webinar.

Close the rooms

Close rooms asks first, then every room counts down 30 seconds, and everyone comes back to the stage. Each room's chat is kept.

With a timer, the rooms close when the timer ends, and every room's count starts 30 to 45 seconds before. The count always lasts at least 30 seconds, so if it starts later than that, the rooms close when it ends, after the timer.

Opening the rooms again puts attendees back in the rooms they were in last time, unless you choose again. With Spread evenly, attendees who were in no room go into the rooms with the fewest people, as far as they hold.

Attendees who arrive late

With Spread evenly or Placed by a host, an attendee who starts watching while the rooms are open goes into the room with the fewest people, or stays on the stage when every room is full. With Chosen by each attendee, they choose a room themselves.

An attendee who selects Leave the room goes back to the stage and is not sent into a room again; Back to and the room's name, on their stage, takes them back to it.

What is kept

The rooms' video and sound are not recorded. The report lists how many attendees were in each room and each room's chat, and its Export CSV in Breakout rooms downloads every room's chat (see Webinar recordings, replays and reports). What attendees see in a room is in Register for a webinar.

If something else goes wrong, Contact support.