Manage breakout rooms

This article outlines how to create, join, and close breakout rooms during your session (Bevy Virtual or Bevy Virtual Conference).

Create a breakout room 

As a host, you can create breakout rooms from the Rooms tab in the right sidebar. You can do this as soon as you have two or more non-host attendees.

To create a breakout room:

1. From the dropdown list, select the number of attendees per room. You can specify up to 50 attendees per room (excluding hosts, who are able to join and leave any room).
   

   The number of total breakout rooms is calculated automatically. For example, if your event has 200 attendees and you select 10 attendees per room, Bevy Virtual  will automatically create 20 rooms. To ensure that a single attendee is never left alone, a room could have 11 attendees in this example.

2. Optional: If you'd like to set a time limit on the breakout room sessions, select Time limit and enter the duration in minutes. After this amount of time, all attendees will be returned to the event.
3. Select Create Rooms.

If attendees join the event after you have created the breakout rooms, they will not be able to join a room. In this case, close all the rooms and recreate the breakout rooms with all attendees.

All attendees will see a dialog box informing them that they will be moved into a breakout room in 10 seconds.

As a host, once the breakout rooms start, you will see a countdown at the top of the page indicating when the breakout rooms will be closed according to the time limit set.

Join a breakout room as a host

As a host, you can join a breakout room automatically (default) or by choosing a room manually.

Automatically join

As a host, when you set the number of attendees per room, you can now include hosts automatically:

In the sidebar, click Rooms and then select Include hosts. This setting is selected by default.

Note the following:

• When Include hosts is selected, each host (except the host who created the rooms) is sent randomly to a breakout room, as attendees are.
• When this option is not selected, only non-hosts are sent to breakout rooms.
• The host who creates the breakout rooms are not sent to a room. You can join a room manually by scrolling through the room list in the sidebar and selecting Join room.
• Even when you are automatically sent to a breakout room, you, as a host, can manually join another room. Scroll through the room list in the sidebar and select Join room.
• The Rooms tab is visible only to hosts, so they can move between rooms, but attendees cannot.

Manually join

If you create breakout rooms and clear the Include hosts checkbox, then you remain in the main session when attendees are sent to the various rooms. You can join a room manually by scrolling through the list of rooms and attendees in the sidebar, and selecting Join room.

Note that the Rooms tab is visible only to hosts, so they can move between rooms, but attendees cannot.

Record a breakout room 

Only hosts are able to record individual breakout rooms.

Learn more about recording in Bevy Virtual.

End breakout room

Hosts can close a breakout room at any time, even before the time limit expires, if one was set.

To close a room, in the sidebar under Rooms, scroll to the room you want to close and select Close room. To close all rooms at once, select Close all rooms above the list of rooms and attendees.

Three minutes before the time limit is reached, Bevy displays a popup letting attendees know that the room will be closing.

Once a breakout room is closed, all attendees in that room are returned to the main session.