Breakout rooms: a collaborative space that works

Abstract

In this paper it’s described a study of the use of breakout rooms for small group work in synchronous online classes. Since the lockdown started, due to the pandemic COVID-19, higher education institutions needed to adapt to the new realities and start using, most frequently, remote learning. In the universe of the most common platforms (e.g. Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Teams), the Zoom platform has been the selected one in the institution where I teach.

This study was done over the second semester of 2020/2021 in a freshman math class.

While teaching large class the interaction and participation of students becomes more difficult and can lead to consequences such as demotivation and lack of involvement of those students. One of the strategies for all students to have (and be) an active part during the learning process in a class is to put them to work in groups.

Breakout rooms is a feature in Zoom that allows split large groups into smaller groups. The teacher has different options to create the rooms, fixed number of groups or randomly.

One of the benefits of using breakout rooms is that it facilitates collaborative learning and interaction (between the students in each breakout room and between students and teacher).

This study was with the use of breakout rooms, randomly created, with a maximum of 5 participants.

During that period the classes were mainly divided into three main parts: an introductory part where some theoretical concepts were complemented with examples, a second part where students were placed in breakout rooms to solve specific group tasks and a last part, a spokesperson, selected by each group, presented the work done by the group to the whole class.

During the time where students are working in separate breakout rooms, I go to each room, see the work that was done until that moment and notice if they need help. Beside those moments participants can, at any moment, click the “Ask for Help” button to call the teacher to that room.

As all this process was very interactive, students worked in small groups and the collaboration was huge, at the end, I noticed that every group concluded, mostly with success, the exercises and they mentioned that the classes was very productive.

This study will also offer some insights for educators in higher education who wish to incorporate breakout rooms as a collaborative learning tool.