Breakout Rooms in MeritHub Classroom

What is a Breakout Room?

Breakout rooms are the sub-rooms that allow you to split your participants into smaller groups in MeritHub live session.

Why breakout rooms are used?

Mostly breakout rooms are used to facilitate discussion and collaboration between a small group. It is a great feature that can be used by teachers or trainers to work on specific subjects with just a few people and focus on the most salient aspects of projects, tasks, or ideas.

How to create Breakout Rooms in MeritHub virtual classroom?

Once a session is scheduled and participants have joined the session, now teachers/hosts or moderators can create breakout rooms. Go to the settings tab and click on breakout rooms.

Now select the total number of breakout rooms you want to create, choose the time duration in minutes. Select the allotment type i.e; manual or automatic. In manual allotment, you can add participants in the rooms as per your choice whereas, in the automatic allotment, students get assigned to the rooms automatically. You can also select the default access which you want to give to the students i.e; audio, audio & video or audio, video & writing.

Three more options are provided. The first one is whether you want to allow students that they can leave the room at any time. The second one is whether you want to allow the first participant of each room to have teacher-like access in that particular room. The third one is whether you want to allow each participant of every room to work on whiteboards independently.

Manual Allotment

Click on the plus icon on the right side of the room icon to add participants in that room, then select the participants whom you want to add to that room from the participant’s list on the left side of the window.

Automatic Allotment

Once you select the allotment type: Automatic, all the students get distributed among the breakout rooms randomly.

You can also switch students between the rooms and can also remove the student(s) from the rooms as shown in the below image.

Now you are good to go to finally create the rooms by clicking on the create button at the bottom of the page.

Sending file(s)/message(s) to breakout rooms

Now once rooms are created, if you want to send a file (pdf or ppt) to all the rooms, you can select send file option and then choose a file from your drive to send as shown in the below image.

If you want to send any message to all the rooms, click on the broadcast message icon, type your message and then click send as shown in the below image.

Entry and exit of a teacher from a breakout room

After the creation of breakout rooms if you want to add participants in a room, send a message or any file to a particular room. You can do it from the options available in the room icon as shown in the below image. If you (The teacher) want to go into a particular room, refer to the below image.

In order to exit the room just click on the exit option as shown in the below image.

Extend duration of a breakout room

If you want to extend the duration of breakout rooms, go to the settings option and select the number of minutes to extend the duration as shown in the image below.

If you want to end the breakout rooms session just click on end button placed below the breakout rooms as shown in the below image.