Breakout rooms allow you to split your Zoom meeting in up to 50 separate sessions. This feature essentially allows you, as the instructor, to divide students into different groups virtually as you would in classrooms when assigning students into groups for discussion. You can step in and out of the different groups at any time.

Overview of Breakout Rooms
Enable Breakout Rooms
Pre-assign Breakout Rooms
Create Breakout Rooms During a Meeting
Manage Breakout Rooms

Overview of Breakout Rooms

Breakout rooms have the same screen sharing, video, and audio chat capability as the main Zoom session.
Time in the breakouts can be limited (e.g., five minutes to discuss a specific question), or indefinite, depending on its set up.
While in breakout room, users cannot hear audio from the main Zoom session. Host can however, "Broadcast" a text-based message to all participants.
The Host can choose to wait in the main session while participants work, or they can enter and leave the breakouts to provide guidance or listen to what’s happening.
Participants in breakouts can click "Ask for Help" to request that the Host join their breakout room.
The Host can move participants between breakout rooms while they are in rooms to mix up the discussion.
The Host can end the breakout rooms, bringing all participants back to the main Zoom meeting. They can then send participants back to the same breakout groups or create new breakout groups.

Preassign Breakout Rooms

To use Breakout Rooms, make sure to you have this feature enabled in Account Settings.

Sign in to the Zoom Web Portal.
In the navigation menu, click "Settings" (Step 1 in screenshot below).
Navigate to the Breakout Room option on the "Meeting" tab and verify that the setting is enabled. If the setting is disabled, click the toggle to enable it (Step 2 in screenshot).

Step to access Settings options in Zoom Web Portal

Step to enable breakout room in Zoom Web Portal setting

Preassign Breakout Rooms

As of now, there isn’t an option to pre-assign participants to breakout rooms using the Zoom App in Canvas.

In order to use the Pre-assignment feature, you will need to log in to the Zoom web portal, and make sure you enable the "Breakout Room preassign" option under the details for each meeting.
Note that there are limitations to this feature:

Your Zoom Desktop Client on Windows or macOS, needs to be of version 4.5.0 or higher
Meetings have to be scheduled through the Zoom web portal. (Feature will not work if meetings are scheduled through the Zoom App in Canvas.)

To pre-assign users to specific rooms,

"Schedule a Meeting" using the Zoom web portal.
Within the meeting settings (1), locate meeting options (2), and make sure "Breakout Room pre-assign" is checked; you’ll then see two options of creating rooms: manually create rooms with user’s emails or via CSV import (3).
To create rooms manually, click "+ Create Rooms" in the meeting settings. Within the Breakout Room Assignment window, click the plus sign (1), add participants to the room using emails (2), and click Save (3).
To create rooms via CSV import, click "Import from CSV". Within the CSV file import window, click "Download" to download the template (1), fill out the excel template with room names and email addresses (2), upload the excel sheet to Zoom (3), and save the meeting.

Create Breakout Room During a Meeting

After starting a meeting,

Click on "Breakout Room" from the Zoom tool bar
Choose to how many breakout rooms to create
And whether to assign automatically, manually, or let participants to choose
Click "create" for finalize breakout room creation

Create Breakout Room.png

Manage Breakout Rooms

Once you have opened up breakout rooms,

To send a message visible to everyone in breakout rooms, click on "Breakout Rooms"on the Zoom toolbar, then "Broadcast a message to all" (Screenshot step 1). Type your message in the textbox (Screenshot step 2), and click "Broadcast" (Screenshot step 3).

Steps to broadcast message to breakout rooms

To end breakout rooms, click "Close All Rooms"
To move participants among breakout rooms, hover over a user’s name in the breakout list (Screenshot step 1).
Then choose which room to move the participant to (Screenshot step 2).

Step to move participants in breakout room

After ending breakout rooms,

To send participants back to breakout rooms, click "Breakout room" on the toolbar (Screenshot Step 1), and then "Open All Rooms" (Screenshot Step 2).
To create new Breakout Rooms, click "Recreate" (Screenshot Step 3).

Step to reopen breakout rooms