MS Teams Breakout Rooms Help Pages
Important Note about Breakout Room Recordings
For the best viewing experience of recordings, after the meeting, Breakout Room recordings should be stopped BEFORE CLOSING the Breakout room. By telling the recording to stop prior to closing the Breakout room, you will cause the recording "tile" to be available, within Teams Chat history, to participants in that Breakout room. If the recording is not stopped before closing, the recording still exists on the OneDrive of the person who started the recording and is shared with attendees, of the Breakout Room, but it must be accessed by going to the OneDrive instead of easily being accessed from the chat history.
Anyone that had been added to the Breakout Room meeting can view the recording, they do not have to have attended.
Breakout Room Session Recordings
When the Attendee/Student Starts the Recording
- The file is shared with the meeting organizer (faculty) automatically. Since it is just shared, it does not appear in the organizer's OneDrive->Recordings folder. It is not stored in their OneDrive. It is stored in the student's OneDrive->Recordings folder.
- ORGANIZERS ACCESS the recording via the recent Chat history, of the Breakout Room chat, or they open OneDrive and select the Shared option.
- Organizers have EDIT access to the recording which means.
- They can copy the video file to another of their OneDrive folders - this becomes a new file and sharing permissions will have to be re-assigned.
- They can download the file and upload it to Echo360 as an easier way to share it with all students. Or they can store it in their Echo360 library for a more efficient storage solution.
- if the organizer moves the file to another OneDrive folder, the video is removed from the student's OneDrive and is no longer shared to the meeting participants.
- The student can share the recording to additional SVSU users.
- The student and organizer can download the video.
- Other students who attended the Breakout room have the recordings available in the "shared" section on OneDrive - view access only.
When the Organizer/Faculty Starts the Recording
- The organizer is the owner of the recording and the video files gets saved to their OneDrive-Recordings folder.
- Students have view access to the recordings only and they cannot download the video files.
Time it Takes for Breakout Rooms to Start
Regardless of the number of Breakout Rooms you are opening, there should be a 10 second start time for those rooms. 10 seconds is how long it takes MS Teams to typically open a meeting and so the time should not increase with a larger number of Breakout rooms, but there is nothing mentioned in their documentation about diminished performance with more Breakout rooms.
Student Joins Meeting After Breakout Rooms Have Been Opened
- Once joining a meeting, students who are late will be listed as participants in the Main Meeting and will be listed in the Breakout Room panel as Not Assigned.
- If the Organizer has started Breakout Rooms and joins one of those Breakout Room meetings, they will have to monitor the Breakout Room panel, within the Main Meeting window, to ensure those students are not forgotten.
- It is possible to assign late students to open Breakout Rooms as well as move students from one open Breakout room, to another, while Breakout rooms are in session.
Announce Time Remaining
After creating breakout rooms, Breakout Room Managers can adjust the room settings. To automatically close Breakout Rooms after a certain amount of time from when they open,
- turn on the Set a Time Limit option.
- Then, select the number of hours and/or minutes the Breakout Rooms should remain open.
- Be sure to click the Save button.
- When the Set a Time Limit option has been turned on, a countdown timer will appear on the top left during the duration of the Breakout Session. Also, an alert will appear 60 seconds before the session is set to end. The session will end and return participants to the main meeting if the auto-move feature (default) is enabled.
Alerts only occur automatically if the Set a Time Limit option is enabled and the alert only appears at 60 seconds. Organizers should keep an eye on their watch and announce, using the megaphone icon, in time to say, 5 or 3 minutes remaining.
Drop/Add Affects Invited Students
When students drop the course, but have already been invited to a Teams Meeting, the Teams meeting remains in their Outlook and Teams app calendars. They could continue to join the meeting. IT recommends using the Teams to Canvas Integration when creating class Team Meetings. Creating Meetings with the Integration provides a button to Add Entire Class. This should be used before AND after the drop/add period for each meeting, each semester to ensure removal of dropped students and the addition of students who have added late. Re-using this Add Entire Class button will remove the meeting link from the calendars of students who have dropped and invite those students who have added the course.