As online conference meeting apps are ramping up their numbers of allowed participants, one drawback in inevitable: decreased engagements.
In an online discussion for example, not all participants would be active. Some can attend but do nothing, and others leaving their desk to do something else, with the moderators having less to no knowledge or control. There is no way of ensuring high engagement in a call that can go up to 100 people.
Google Meet is one of the apps that provide online conference calls with many participants at once.
And this time, it is introducing 'Breakout Rooms' to allow teachers and educators to break their classes into smaller groups for things like projects or focused discussions.
The feature can make conference calls less overwhelming.
In a blog post, Google said that Breakout Rooms allow teachers and educators to divide participants into smaller groups.
This feature was highly requested the company wrote, since it has the potential to increase engagement by allowing simultaneous small group discussions.
The call's creator can create up to 100 Breakout Rooms inside a call.
At first, the moderators need to decide how many Breakout Rooms they want, and participants will then be randomly and evenly distributed across the rooms.
Moderators can manually add people to other rooms if they want. They can jump from one room to another to monitor and join discussions.
In the meantime, the Breakout Room feature is only available on the web. But anyone with a Google Account regardless of device can join.
Initially, the feature is made available to Google Workspace Enterprise for Education customers. The tech giant plans to make it available to other Workspace tiers in the future.
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Google has been busy improving Google Meet by releasing new features and functionalities.
Earlier, it even made the video calling service free to everyone and brought it to the Gmail app on Android and iOS, making it even more accessible.
These happened amid the 'COVID-19' coronavirus pandemic that forced many people to study and work remotely.
As online meetings are going on much more frequent than ever, with video conferencing rival Zoom still holding the title as the king, Google wants to beat it in its own game, or at least trail it as close as possible.
Zoom already offers its own version of Breakout Rooms to all users, and that since 2015. In this case, Google is playing catch-up.
Zoom however, can only split participants into 50 different rooms.
This is half of the 100 possible rooms offered by Google Meet.