Having been teased back in August, Google Meet is now rolling out its highly anticipated breakout rooms feature to help with distance learning. Given the nature of its usage, it was only available to Enterprise for Education customers at launch, but it’s now rolling out to most of the other Workspace tiers. This excludes Business Starter, G Suite Basic, Education, or Nonprofits.
Breakout rooms allow you to split call participants into up to 100 separate rooms so they can take part in smaller, more focused conversations. Think of it like sending a group of students to a separate corner of a physical classroom to work together on something before regrouping with everyone else to present.
Users are automatically and randomly split into separate rooms, but you can still manually move them around if you want to make specific pairings. Only event creators can make breakout rooms and they must be made during a video call from a computer. Anyone joining can do so from desktop, mobile, and now via phone dial-in. The event organizer can place a timer on the rooms to automatically re-join everyone together when it expires and it will sound off 30-seconds prior to alert everyone. Room participants can also flag a moderator if they have a question. If you are a Workspace user in one of the aforementioned tiers, you should have access to breakout rooms now.
