1. When scheduling a meeting or editing an existing meeting (or recurring meetings), ensure ‘Enable join before host’ and ‘Only authenticated users can join’ are selected.

NOTE: ‘Only authenticated users can join’ is very important for you to select because your pre-assigned participants are recognised based on your students’ email addresses.

2. On the same Meeting page, select ‘Breakout Room pre-assign’.

3. After ‘Breakout Room pre-assign’ is selected, you can choose ‘Create Rooms’ or ‘Import from CSV’.

4. If you choose ‘Import from CSV’, please create an Excel CSV file using this template (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nsCjClcVSNCrqtDcgjLp2CjNk1TZ5hME/view). In this CSV file, you list students’ email addresses under different groups.

NOTE: DO NOT CHANGE the headings in the CSV file as they are unique identifiers for pre-assigning breakout rooms. You can modify the rest of the content.

5. After pressing ‘Import from CSV’ file, choose the CSV file you have created, and then save. The breakout rooms have been pre-assigned.

6. When you start the ZOOM session, make sure that all students have already entered before you choose ‘Breakout Rooms’.

7. If you found that some students’ names haven’t appeared in the name lists under certain breakout rooms, please click the ‘Recreate’ link on the Breakout Room page, and then choose ‘Recover to pre-assigned rooms’. Then you will see all the students who have entered the ZOOM meeting have been assigned to the target groups. You can then click ‘Open All Rooms’ so that students can join a particular breakout room.

Please view the following YouTube video for a video guide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0Q7g3zh_Us

You can also visit the ZOOM website for detailed instructions on pre-assigning participants to breakout rooms:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360032752671-Pre-assigning-participants-to-breakout-rooms#h_36f71353-4190-48a2-b999-ca129861c1f4