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I teach a course, and in the final day the student teams present their projects. The event will probaly be held remotely. I would like to give a virtual room to each team, and allow the visitors and the judges to move freely between rooms in order to watch the projects.

I looked at Zoom Breakout Rooms. It allows the host to create rooms, but does not allow participants to move freely from room to room - the host has to manually transfer them.

I thought that adding a cohost would help, but the manual says that "Co-hosts do not have access to the following controls as they are only available as host controls... Start breakout rooms or move participants from one breakout room to another", so this too does not work.

Is there a way in Zoom (or maybe in another software) to create rooms, such that the visitors can move between rooms without the host's intervention?

DavidPostill
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Erel Segal-Halevi
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  • if the users have links for each room they can freely connect to any at any time – Suncatcher Jun 08 '20 at 06:42
  • Do the Breakout Rooms have an individual link, different than the link of the parent Zoom room? – Erel Segal-Halevi Jun 08 '20 at 12:15
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    No, I just tested and can confirm that no, they have no individual links. You can [leave the breakout room](https://imgur.com/undefined) by yourself as a participant, but you cannot enter arbitrary room without [being assigned](https://imgur.com/2m81Lsr) by host, otherwise you'll see [such prompt](https://imgur.com/WNbfuiZ) without even being able to see the list of existing rooms. So this tools seems inapplicable to your case – Suncatcher Jun 09 '20 at 12:23
  • @ErelSegal-Halevi I made a drastic edit to my answer that you may want to see. A few months ago, Zoom added this feature. – Laurel May 07 '21 at 02:16
  • @Laurel Thanks a lot! – Erel Segal-Halevi May 07 '21 at 09:11

2 Answers2

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Jitsi Meet (an open-source Zoom alternative, https://meet.jit.si/) lets you connect to a meeting with just a link. It should allow you to create as many meetings as you want so that the judges can just click on the next project's meeting link. You could give each team their own room, and from my testing you should be able to be in as many rooms/meetings as you want at the same time.

Aman Anas
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Yes, this is now possible with Zoom.

As you're about to start the breakout rooms, there's an option labeled "Let participants choose room" which does what you want. Select it! You should also enable "Allow participants to return to the main session at any time" in the detailed settings so that everyone can leave their breakout room and go to another.

Once the rooms are started, participants can click on "breakout rooms", then hover over the number of people in the room and click "join".

It says Join next to the rooms you aren't in and Leave next to the room you are in
(Screenshot from Tufts)

I've seen it used successfully with even young kids. (The few who can't do it can be moved manually.)

You just need to make sure the host knows how to work the feature. Practice beforehand.

What I have also seen done is having multiple Zoom rooms open, and the participants are given a list of Zoom links that they can join when they want to. (Usually there is a main session that everyone joins to start out the event.) This setup comes with different challenges[ (every host needs to pay attention to let people in usually, you may not have Pro licenses, if relevant, for each host, etc.).

Laurel
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