Video Chat App - Breakout Rooms


Would love for the Video Chat app to have a breakout room feature so teams can break out into smaller groups to collaborate and communicate on parts and then rejoin back to the entire team to discuss, all without having to use 3rd-party tools like Zoom.

 

By clicking “Add Breakout” the chat app generates a home room and various breakout rooms.  Clicking the ‘+’ button generates additional rooms.    At the start of the video chat session, all participants begin in the home room.  When ready to breakout, participants are instructed which room to join to work on their part of the project, and they jump to that room by clicking on the corresponding room number (no need for a moderator to pre-assign users to rooms like in Zoom).

 

Users have the ability to freely jump between rooms by selecting each room number -- great for rotations and faciliator-hopping!

 

The moderator of the session can choose to “Return all to homeroom” which moves the users out of their breakout rooms and returns them back into the home room to resume full group discussion.

 

Hi Alex,

what a great idea - Yes i would like to see this!

Michael


This would be a great addition for sure - reducing the number of tools which participants have to switch between will help to increase engagement!


Yes, this would be AMAZING. The video chat feature is one that drew me to Miro over Mural, and this would take it to the next level.

The other thing I love about Zoom’s execution of this feature is that it tells you how many people will be in each breakout room, and lets you see and choose who is in each room. This is pretty critical to making this feature useful.


Great idea. I thought it was already installed in miro when I saw your post with breakout icons, hahaha.

Now I’m using miro with Zoom for driving a breakout session, so I really love this additional chat app if it doesn’t require more high speed internet than Zoom.

Atsu


One workaround I have used is to embed Jitsi video rooms directly in my board— I'd much rather have it as a built-in feature, but it works as a workaround if you don’t want to be using Zoom at the same time :)


Hey @Alex D Great idea indeed! Could you tell me why it is important that there are no pre-assigned users to the rooms?


Hi there @Paul McGregor Could you describe to me how exactly do you break users to the groups right now? Would love to hear more about your use-case


@Kate Ivanova -  Hi Kate.  Pre-assigned users could become an additional feature on top of the core request, but it shouldn’t be a required action for the breakouts. 

Assignment requires additional effort on the part of facilitators. It also depends on guest users being identified in order for assignment to work.

The core request is about the breakout rooms itself.  Like chat rooms, a person can switch from room to room at will to contribute or comment as necessary.  They are not locked into a particular room, providing them flexibility to move and collaborate across various work streams.


I am a consultant - adding this feature would change my world and make my ability to work with my clients 100 times better for workshops - it’s an absolute must and would insanely turbocharge the miro offering!


Miro is so close to being the fabled one platform to do everything in a live facilitated workshop. This idea, plus a great facilitator/participant permissions system, are the only things that would eventually allow us to leave Zoom behind entirely and run our workshops entirely within Miro.


This would be awesome, I’m a teacher currently using Zoom for my classes and just starting to experiment with miro for a whiteboard, the breakout rooms is a key feature of zoom I basically couldn’t live without.

One issue I have with the Zoom implementation is that it’s a bit clumsy for me the teacher to go join each breakout room to see how they are doing - it works but it’s not exactly a smooth user experience, I suddenly appear in the group which is a bit jarring. In a physical classroom I can just kind of listen in a little bit as I move around the classroom (without really joining in, my students are english learners so I’m always keen to give them space, as a native speaker I can so easily become a larger presence in the conversation than I really want to be)  , in miro you’d obviously need to make it clear that the teacher has this ability (to protect the students privacy - so I don’t inadvertently hear them saying someting they don’t want me to hear!!)  but I would love to see this “hover” feature implemented in an online platform like miro!

also, while I’m hear brainstorming: if there was (on the whiteboard that is the miro environment) a spacial / visual implementation of this in some way (group one is in the top left, group two middle left, etc)I think that would help bridge the gap by employing our concept of space (very well developed) to help our brains keep track of the groups (especially useful for me as I move around various groups). In zoom it’s just a list and thus a bit untethered, floating in the ether kind of experience. Maybe this could be in some way tied to areas of the whiteboard if for example different groups are talking about different areas of the whiteboard….

Anyway I confess I’ve only really starting playing with miro this morning, have set up a board to try out with my first class on monday, so I don’t really know it well. I just ended up here after searching “miro breakout rooms” - I hope my comments are of some use!


Hi @tensaimon,

Thanks for illustrating your use-case in such detail. I’m sure this will be helpful for the Miro team to consider if/when breakout rooms are an available feature!

To help with getting started, I’d recommend taking a look at the Getting Started with Miro course (15 minutes) in Miro Academy, or taking a look at the Getting Started with Miro webinar, which you can watch on-demand.

Michael Sohn


This would be awesome, I’m a teacher currently using Zoom for my classes and just starting to experiment with miro for a whiteboard, the breakout rooms is a key feature of zoom I basically couldn’t live without.

One issue I have with the Zoom implementation is that it’s a bit clumsy for me the teacher to go join each breakout room to see how they are doing - it works but it’s not exactly a smooth user experience, I suddenly appear in the group which is a bit jarring. In a physical classroom I can just kind of listen in a little bit as I move around the classroom (without really joining in, my students are english learners so I’m always keen to give them space, as a native speaker I can so easily become a larger presence in the conversation than I really want to be)  , in miro you’d obviously need to make it clear that the teacher has this ability (to protect the students privacy - so I don’t inadvertently hear them saying someting they don’t want me to hear!!)  but I would love to see this “hover” feature implemented in an online platform like miro!

also, while I’m hear brainstorming: if there was (on the whiteboard that is the miro environment) a spacial / visual implementation of this in some way (group one is in the top left, group two middle left, etc)I think that would help bridge the gap by employing our concept of space (very well developed) to help our brains keep track of the groups (especially useful for me as I move around various groups). In zoom it’s just a list and thus a bit untethered, floating in the ether kind of experience. Maybe this could be in some way tied to areas of the whiteboard if for example different groups are talking about different areas of the whiteboard….

Anyway I confess I’ve only really starting playing with miro this morning, have set up a board to try out with my first class on monday, so I don’t really know it well. I just ended up here after searching “miro breakout rooms” - I hope my comments are of some use!

What a great visualization idea, @tensaimon (the one about spacial and visual implementation of the breakout rooms in the board). It would help a lot!


I would love to draw a boundary around areas of the board and get the chatter from said boundary. So there is no need to organise into groups, people just click on an icon in the boundary that allows them to get the chatter from that boundary

 


I recently been experimenting with spatial.chat combination with Miro. If functionality would be embedded in miro it would be a killer future! It would be great to simulate a real room. Meaning the further you are away from a person, the less you hear that person, or even putting boundaries in like virtual rooms in what @Vincent Naughton said.
 


@Kenny Baas-Schwegler 

thnx for the heads-up on spatial.chat - using it with a shared desktop is AWESOME!


This is a brilliant function, top priority, last strike against other collaboration tools :)


Would love for the Video Chat app to have a breakout room feature so teams can break out into smaller groups to collaborate and communicate on parts and then rejoin back to the entire team to discuss, all without having to use 3rd-party tools like Zoom.

 

By clicking “Add Breakout” the chat app generates a home room and various breakout rooms.  Clicking the ‘+’ button generates additional rooms.    At the start of the video chat session, all participants begin in the home room.  When ready to breakout, participants are instructed which room to join to work on their part of the project, and they jump to that room by clicking on the corresponding room number (no need for a moderator to pre-assign users to rooms like in Zoom).

 

Users have the ability to freely jump between rooms by selecting each room number -- great for rotations and faciliator-hopping!

 

The moderator of the session can choose to “Return all to homeroom” which moves the users out of their breakout rooms and returns them back into the home room to resume full group discussion.

 

Excellent Idea, What is functioning good for me, is to put a link of a virtual meeting room like Wonder.me… it fucntions good. But a real integrated function makes the tool absolutelly independent from other video-conferencing programs….https://www.wonder.me/

 


I would love to draw a boundary around areas of the board and get the chatter from said boundary. So there is no need to organise into groups, people just click on an icon in the boundary that allows them to get the chatter from that boundary

 

This would be simply amazing for me as a trainer and teacher!!


Would love for the Video Chat app to have a breakout room feature so teams can break out into smaller groups to collaborate and communicate on parts and then rejoin back to the entire team to discuss, all without having to use 3rd-party tools like Zoom.

 

By clicking “Add Breakout” the chat app generates a home room and various breakout rooms.  Clicking the ‘+’ button generates additional rooms.    At the start of the video chat session, all participants begin in the home room.  When ready to breakout, participants are instructed which room to join to work on their part of the project, and they jump to that room by clicking on the corresponding room number (no need for a moderator to pre-assign users to rooms like in Zoom).

 

Users have the ability to freely jump between rooms by selecting each room number -- great for rotations and faciliator-hopping!

 

The moderator of the session can choose to “Return all to homeroom” which moves the users out of their breakout rooms and returns them back into the home room to resume full group discussion.

 

 

 

Ahh.. I was searching around where the “add breakout” button was 😛

 

Alex, this feature request absolutely rocks!

 

Have you considered putting Miro inside a video chat app instead of asking Miro to develop it?

 

We (Toasty) have integrated with Miro so you can get some of the benefits you asked for today:

  1. Block out time to have breakouts in your workshop agenda. See the post here: https://blog.toasty.ai/product-google-integration-flexible-agenda/
  2. Design the experience inside your breakouts -- you can provide instructions for participants to open the same Miro board (without ever risking their attention by asking them to switch apps back and forth). Post: https://blog.toasty.ai/tips-for-better-virtual-breakout-rooms/
  3. Let participants go into breakout rooms and collaborate on their section of your Miro board
  4. Bring everyone back to the main room in 1-click
  5. Additionally, there’s an Open Rooms feature to let participants roam freely to topics they are interested in discussing. Post: https://blog.toasty.ai/product-let-participants-move-freely-between-breakout-rooms/


Curious to hear what the community thinks about it.

 

 


That would be great to have. I hope they have it in the development pipeline


Our team likes the all in Miro solution with the Videochat function. 

Would be great to introduce a group call like break out rooms for working on the same board.

At the moment we have to escape to zoom for this or work on different boards.

This is tedious


Great idea! Defo needed for our team!