Breakout Rooms

1.  Purpose:

Breakout rooms are best used for collaboration and group activities. Students introduce each other, work on homeworks, problems, projects, research, brain storming, and other related activities in small groups and sometimes they will have to share the materials from the groups sessions with the rest of the students.

2.  Description:

The moderator determines how many groups to create, which students are put in specific groups, and all activities related to that event. Breakout rooms are similar to real physical rooms. Students in one breakout room have acccess to all the features of ELive but do not hear, nor know what is happening outside the room. A moderator outside the room has to go in the room in order to assist students.

Note that students in a breakout room can ONLY reach the moderator by raising their hands or by sending private text messages

3.  How can it achieved?

One can create breakout rooms in 2 ways:

1. Create On-the-Fly breakout rooms
2. Create Formal breakout rooms

Step-by-step procedures are found in the eluminate website: http://elluminate.com/support/docs/7.0/Elluminate_Live_7.0_Breakout_Rooms_Quick_Reference_Guide.pdf

In addition, you can listen to an introductory recording found on the elluminate website: Recording

4.  How to use Breakout Rooms effectively?

1. Great for teamwork in small groups to get students involved and to increase the opportunity to talk, work together, and share and discuss ideas; hence students in small groups can learn from each other.
2. Can be used to complete individual self paced assignments by creating a breakout room for each student.
3. A good way to have team competition or prepare for debates

Discussions among students in the breakout rooms will motivate students toward further learning in the subject and develop students’ problem solving or thinking skills, and make the students construct their own meanings

5.  Problem Based Learning

Example for part 1: Discipline: Developmental Mathematics

Example for part 3: “Team competition”

Example: “Switching Teams”

Example: “Interviewing the Subject Experts!”

6.  Ideas from elsewhere

In the discussion on the Learning Times site, in the forum: “Active and Efficient Teaching ONLINE!”, Ann Randall shares with us the following:

“Our breakout groups have had projects and deadlines assigned. I also met a professor who gives his groups the choice to “kick out” a nonperforming member by majority vote. If that happens, the person has to either convince the group to take him back or try to work out a solution with the teacher. Yesterday I was at another training class in which the professor says she assigns a different student moderator to each group. The moderator gets a grade in addition to the group’s grade. A few weeks ago I visited a professor’s online class in which he assigns students to two different sides of a question (for instance natives and immigrants in the 16th century) and has them debate, specifying that each student must make 3 posts”

And Buthaina Al Othman shares with us the following: “I used “Breakout Rooms” available in Elluminate eLive for a blended class of Business English for bankers earlier. I found this feature quite helpful and encouraged peer-to-peer interaction during reading and summarizing group activities. I had my class divided into three groups and then created “Breakout Rooms” where each group read, discussed and summarized the reading it was assigned. At the end each group presented its part”

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