Engaging Breakout Room Approaches

Breakout Rooms Circa 2020

When the University of Alberta adopted Zoom in 2020, breakout rooms became a key strategy for group work, project work, and connection at an isolated time. In the years that have followed, students and instructors increasingly complained of Zoom fatigue, a set of common physical or psychological responses of feeling stressed, anxious, drowsy, irritable, and exhausted (Doring, 2022; Riedl, 2023). You may hear your students groan or see them disappear from class when you initiate Zoom rooms. How do we optimize the advantages of Zoom breakout rooms, as well as real-time collaboration and connection, while minimizing Zoom fatigue? 

Strategies for 2025 and beyond

When we first started doing breakouts, we typically announced, “I’m going to send you into a breakout room now!” and focused on the technology for getting them into the rooms. Current approaches focus on creating breakout rooms where diverse students feel comfortable participating, sharing, and contributing to the task or discussion. 

Consider breakout room approaches that give students more choice and responsibility in how they carry out their online interactions and care for their own mental, physical, and social needs: 

  • Share breakout questions or tasks ahead of class.
  • Give students time to review materials and gather their thoughts before assigning them to breakout rooms. 
  • Give students prompts to get them started talking in the breakout room.
  • Set time limits for breakouts and send a 1-minute warning before bringing everyone back to the main session. 
  • Ask student groups to decide on a breakout spokesperson if reporting back verbally after a breakout.
  • Give students the option to keep cameras on or off during the breakouts.
  • Use a shared Google doc or slide to share the group work from a breakout.
  • Following a discussion in a breakout, ask the students to vote or provide a 1-2 sentence summary in the chat.

Strategy 1: Three types of interaction

When setting up your breakout, give students the option of:

  1. staying in the main Zoom room and working on a task individually with cameras off (i.e. leaving or not entering the breakout room)
  2. going into a breakout room to collaborate with 4-6 students on the same task
  3. asking the instructor or teaching assistant questions about the task in a separate Zoom room or a Google document

Note: When creating breakout rooms, group students into groups of eight to account for students who may not enter or leave the rooms. Consider making the Google Doc with questions available to students who stay in the main Zoom room and choose to join a breakout room. 

Strategy 2: Instructor to student to group to instructor interaction

Step 1: Provide your students with a problem

Step 2: Give your students 5 minutes to work on the problem with cameras off individually

Step 3: Distribute your students into breakout groups of 3-4 students to compare answers for 5-10 minutes

Step 4: Close the breakout rooms and share the answer to the problem

Step 5: Students ask the instructor questions about the solution in the chat

Note: This strategy is particularly effective in online classes of 100 or more students

Strategy 3: Blackout to Chat interactions

Step 1: Instructor poses a question problem or gives a task 

Step 2: Instructor randomly assigns students to groups of 3 or 4 in a breakout room to work together with cameras off

Step 3: Close breakout rooms after a set time limit

Step 4: Students have 5 minutes to enter their responses in the Zoom chat and five more minutes to read the responses of other students

Step 5: Instructor provides feedback on responses in the chat

Learn more: Additional resources

Internal to U of A:

  • For pedagogical support with breakout rooms, request a consultation with a member of the Centre for Teaching and Learning team
  • For technical assistance with breakout rooms, contact the eClass Support Team at eclass@ualberta.ca or 780-492-8000

External to U of A:

Doring, N., De Moor, K., Fiedler, M., Shonenenburg, K. & Raake, A. (2022). Videoconference fatigue: A conceptual analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Feb.12; 19(4). 

Riedl, R., Kostoglou, K., Wriessnegger, S.C., & Muller-Putz, G.R. (2023). Videoconference fatigue from a neurophysiological perspective, Experimental evidence based on electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG). Scientific Reports, Oct. 26: 131.