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

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

[Carlos Sanz]

Hi all,

I use the breakout during the training sessions to make team developments and look for the best solution to the issue.

[s_pappa]

Breakout sessions are very useful for teachers who need some one-on-one time with a student, however it would be extra helpful, if we could still watch the shared screen/files of the general meeting or if we could also use the whiteboard, while in breakout session.

Thank you!

[Bitfarmer]

We use breakout rooms as a law firm for many different reasons.  Primarily the ability to drive private conversations to a breakout room during a hearing or deposition is very valuable.

[Cole Callahan]

 Thank you all for the genuine responses and for sharing how you are using breakout sessions today! The original post has been updated with a downloadable Quick start guide. Make sure to check it out and use it as you like and share within your organizations.

[joe.valerieniemeyer]

Breakout sessions have been used a few times for social settings, but not yet for collaboration as we are a smaller community. I do have plans to work our national community into an account, at which time, breakout sessions will be more in play. The spreadsheet upload is really tantalizing. 

[npoulson]

I love using the breakout sessions because it allows group work in smaller, more personal settings. One of the features of WebEx that I like is that it sends a reminder email to users through which they can click in to join the meeting. One tip: When I first tried to use breakout sessions, the feature didn't seem to work. What I found out is that if the users click on the link in the email, they can't join a breakout session.  However, if they log in through Canvas, the breakout rooms function perfectly.

[neha.patni]

As a Assistant Professor in an Engineering College, I had to be very precise with the allocation of students for examination. I have been using this breakout feature since last semester and in this semester also. It is an excellent feature to be utilised in specially laboratory sessions where I can demonstrate the experiments to students in group and also while taking their viva voce examination. I could have two three examiner panel also as co host for that. Expel feature is helpful in taking out student for some time and assigning them individual task. I also liked the random assigning of student in breakout groups, so that the students with random experiments can be put together for further discussion. Overall this is unique and very helpful feature for faculty.

[Anil Patil]

Not used breakout session but would like to try it.

[EQuintero]

Our company uses breakout sessions to put interviewees in a different room while the interviewing committee prepares for the interview.  This allows for us to start the meeting early for the interviewee, make general introductions, while we make sure that all the interviewing committee is ready for the interview.  Many times we have seen members of the interviewing committee join late, and without this feature, it would be very difficult to to manage this situation.

[mrojassalazar]

Hello.

Im personally discovered breakout session on this year, when we make a Sales Training and we have to divide the main group by client focus but with the possibility to monitor and control the process and the methodology application for each group. It was an amazing experience, useful and easy to implement. I don’t know why I’ve never used this before, but I’m sure that I will use and apply in our next training and sessions.

A great tool.

[sean.carnahan]

Most recently, I've hosted Webex meetings for our University's Board of Trustees meetings. I was able to break our board out of the main room so they could discuss privately in their executive session. I've also assisted many a faculty in setting up breakouts for their online and hybrid classes. Webex has been a great resource for our university. 

[tleydig]

This is new to me and I can see many possibilities for application within our medical offices. 

[MariLola]

Our best use of breakout sessions so far has been using them to design live virtual escape rooms for students.  We give them a scenario with clues and then a problem to solve.  When they give us the correct answer through a private message, we assign them to a breakout session with the next scenario and challenge.  As they complete the challenge in each breakout session they move through escape rooms.  This lets them use their problem solving skills and makes learning more interactive and ups their interest and engagement.

[crisfordj]

Greetings - 

I use breakout sessions with my 8th grade Science class. However, we have never had formal trainings on the process, and I have never explored beyond the instant functionality in the room. Just reading the initial post I see that we can upload spreadsheets to pre-define rooms and their names. Very cool function that I will explore.

JC

[petecusumanoCWU]

Our University's Career Services held an Employer Networking Event via WebEx. There were 9 employers represented and 50 students attending. I established 9 breakout rooms and assigned 1 employer representative to each breakout room then assigned the students evenly among the rooms. I set the session for 15 mins automatically ending after a 1 min countdown and started the breakout session. After the first session ended and everyone returned to the main room I only needed to reassign the employer representatives, rotating them each into the next breakout room, and start the next session. Now every employer representative had a fresh group of students. I continued this for a total of 9 sessions resulting in every student having met with every employer representative. The event went smoothly and was well received.