Webex Employee's Favorite Feature of the Month: Breakout Sessions

[aahawkin]

How do YOU breakout of the crowd?

Group and engage your attendees into smaller meetings with Webex breakout sessions. With enough room to be heard above the crowd, you can drive active participation in all your virtual meets.

If you've used breakout sessions, we want to know!

In fewer than 100 words, respond with your tips and/or tricks for effectively using breakout sessions for facilitating training, teaching class, or meeting with friends and family.

Hosts, do you save time preassigning participants to rooms via spreadsheet upload? Teachers, do you name the rooms after subjects or something more fun? You will be entered into a giveaway for a FREE Cisco 730 headset, by responding to this post!

This post will stay active for the entire month of April. We will randomly select a winner and reach out to them directly in the first week of May.

UPDATE: We asked educators how they use breakout rooms for effective and engaging remote learning. Read "7 breakout sessions tips from K-12 and higher ed educators" to learn more. 

More about Breakout sessions

As a host, you can preassign members to sessions, add or remove on the fly, or allow guests to float. You can even mute that one guy pouring coffee... We hope it’s coffee. As a guest, hold deep discussions or explore sessions to quickly find information. At the end of the session, you can even use artificial intelligence to show the clapping icon. Try breakout rooms today!

If you are not familiar with all the features, check out these links to learn more.

Webex Meetings | Breakout Sessions 

Breakout Sessions | Features 

Breakout Sessions | Best Practices 
Blog | Educator's Tips on Getting Remote Learning Right

To avoid emails flooding your inbox, be sure to uncheck the box Email me when someone replies when you respond.

 

Respond to this post and share how you breakout! Your response will enter you into a giveaway for a FREE Cisco 730 Headset!

[erica.rivas]

Hello Everyone,

Due to the pandemic, we used the breakout rooms in order to administer team Readiness Assurance Test (tRAT). This allowed medical students to take their weekly tRAT exams virtually. In order to manage breakout rooms we designated roles to the host and cohosts. The host took care of assigning the breakout rooms and the cohosts were assigned to trouble-shoot technical issues within the breakout rooms. Each breakout room had an assigned student that would share the tRAT exam content in order for the group to participate in negotiating their answers choices and deepen their understanding of each exam item. Breakout rooms were very useful when the medical class size is over 100 students. 

Regards,

Erica 

Paul L. Foster School of Medicine

TTUHSC EL Paso TX

[Jaime MATEUS Gomes]

Breakouts sessions help me a lot. I can teach better and make my class more fun to everybody join!

[Hamza.vanderMaas]

I have used this during an information meeting, where we could ask questions to the head of certain departments during the breakout session. I still miss the option that a group can indicate that a certain group is already ready to leave de breakout 

[Heiko Maier]

Just to let you know, the positive impact from the pandemic is the development speed of WebEx. 

We use the breakout sessions a lot for trouble shooting sessions within data center operations (war room) where a lot of parties are involved.

Especially when we have also external Companies involved where their mother tongue is different to the local one. It is a very easy way to give them a "area" to feel more comfortable and prepare the results for the bigger "round".

But this is just one example out of many.

Thank you Cisco for making workdays easier during the pandemic with WebEx

 

[RyoAlpha75608]

Hello all,

I would like to share with the experience about the breakout session for our customers. The feature is really a game changer and help our customers win orders in modern and future way. It's super convenience, especially during the covid-19. We're waiting for this feature for a long time!

In Taiwan, we currently have many expos for the business partners. In the past, we need to invite the customers from oversea and join the expos to get the business. As you can imagine that many customers and many factory owners need to have a quick conversation to ensure the requirement. In the past, we could meet the needs face to face. However, it's impossible to do it after the pandemic!

Fortunately, with breakout session feature in Webex, we're able to do it in the effective and efficient way but also with the great security. We are able to divide attendees as many small groups to have quick discussions. The coolest thing is we only need to host one meeting at once and all tasks are complete! Now customers enjoy the way they work and close the deal in the way we cannot think about before.

At the moment, the world needs a fantastic meeting app to bring people together again. With the satisfaction with our customers, the breakout session feature of Cisco Webex is very applicable and practical for the needs of people. Good job and thank you, Cisco!

[JPAyliffe]

Break-out sessions are a great idea. For complex topics I adopt the '6 hats' concept: White for facts; Yellow for positive aspects; Green for approaches; Blue for big picture; Black for negatives, and Red - feelings and emotions. Sub-groups break off to discuss only the 'hat' that they have been assigned. After discussion, the sub groups are brought together to summarise their positions, by 'hat'. With the sub groups, I then collectively assesses the information and ask the combined sub-groups to vote on the way forward, after each member has been given the opportunity of considering opposing or supporting views.

[NKG]

Picture collecting personal goals of a 30 member team in 30 minutes. Having 6, 5 member breakout sessions to work on the same agenda, changes the participation time of each participant from 1 minute and 29 minutes of waiting, to about 10 minutes per person with real opportunities for engagement and interactions.

Here's a few tips from my work.

• Have instructions ready for teach breakout session and empower someone to run the breakout sessions.
• Consider including an icebreaker for the breakout session. 
• As participants become used to this approach they are more likely to be more involved.

[kovacskrisztian]

Hi All,

We have recurring discussions every morning due to COVID situation. Breakout Sessions can help us to make small, concentrated team sessions. New World, new great features.

BR,

Krisztian

[v-salia]

Let me Tell you about the new tool called "Breakout Session".

Up until now we had to open several different sessions so employers could continue thier productivity during the covid-19 pandemic.

As an IT, it was too **bleep**-hard to orchestrate on all of the webex sessions.

But now! with the new feature I can seperate and organize the company's webex sessions.

Thanks Cisco, you did a hell of a job there!!!

[harikeshan]

We have been using Webex breakout sessions in Webex Meetings and Trainings. Usually, we pre-assign the breakout sessions for Webex Trainings, where its a more structured session.  However, with Webex Meetings being more ad-hoc, wherein we breakout for specific tasks such as working on a client pitch, or project before we get back to the main session. 

A Nice to have for Webex Meetings would be the attention indicator available in Webex Trainings and Events.

[JoAmirJohan]

I love ODL, but I think students miss out on the social aspect of live classrooms during ODL. You know, when they're just hanging out before the teacher arrives or after class ends. So I'm trying what I call "The Lounge" where I will have a session open before class begins and students can come in to talk to each other and I won't interrupt them (in fact I'm not even listening. I'm just there because without a host the audio won't work). I prepare some breakout rooms that they can choose to enter in case they want to have a conversation in smaller groups. The whole thing is voluntary.

By and large, not many students actually use it, but sometimes there will be random students in random breakout rooms and I hope they are building memories together.

[srinivasan.rao1]

This is an ideal feature for the Top Management to percolate the Organizations Vision to its last member with utmost clarity

The Top Management can express their Vision to the Department Heads, who can in turn breakup and address their own departments to explain, what the Organizations Vision mean for their specific department .

Once done, all can return to the main "Meeting Hall"

[tomand]

Nice feature and it works perfect. Have used it in our company when running social quiz with several groups. Started with meeting all together and then "going into teamrooms"

[neeraj.gupta]

NEVER BEFORE! IN THE ANNALS OF BANKING HISTORY!!

INDIAN BANK IS THE FIRST TO HAVE TRAINED A MASSIVE  NUMBER  OF OFFICERS THROUGH VIRTUAL MODE FROM VARIOUS CENTRES ACROSS INDIA.  YES!! EVEN THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC HAS NOT STALLED ITS SPIRITS & ENTHUSIASM.

WebEx breakout rooms is a video conferencing features that allows the our Training Center to separate larger video meetings and webinars into several smaller groups of a set number of participants. These breakout sessions can last for as long as the Faculties/coordinator would like and can have multiple breakout sessions within a single meeting. Breakout Session is not intuitive in Microsoft Team as compare to Cisco WebEx.

During the Pandemic (Covid-19) , Bank's training system has use breakout session features effectively and efficiently to split participants in smaller groups from the main WebEx meeting to collaborate and share ideas over audio/video (like various case study and assignment and multiple parallel session based on participant domain ). 

[cvakoulas]

Hello! breakout Sessions is a fantastic feature. I first used it without ever hearing about it before, during a lab session / webinar. Something was not working in my Lab, and a couple of the panelists joined me on a breakout session and solved the issue, in an Instant! Great work Cisco!