Experience Report on the Use of Breakout Rooms in a Large Online Course

Abstract

In this paper, we present our experience with the use of breakout rooms in a second year undergraduate Software Design course at a large North American institution. Following the switch to remote instruction during the coronavirus pandemic, we revamped our in-person Software Design course to be delivered as a flipped online course, making extensive use of in-lecture exercises completed during breakout rooms. We report on the structure and logistics of this lecture design (for a large class of 300+ students). To gain insights into the impact of the use of breakout rooms on student experience, we conducted weekly student surveys asking for feedback on the lectures and specifically on the use of breakout rooms. Although many students had positive feelings regarding the use of breakout rooms, a significant percentage of students (an average of 47% of the survey responses each week) expressed negative feelings toward them. In an end-of-term survey, we specifically asked students about what they felt worked best for breakout rooms in terms of group size and pre-assigned versus randomized groups, and if there were any other areas that they felt needed improvement. Some of the patterns we observed were that most students liked smaller groups (2-5 people), preferred staying in the same group throughout the semester, and enjoyed the use of breakout rooms as long as others in their room were active participants. We share the details of these survey results as well as the tips and lessons that we learned through this experience.

Group work in Zoom breakout rooms to enhance English-speaking self-efficacy for active learning activities

“…If the students in a group are not active and no student partakes in the group discussion, they only get stuck there and learn nothing from the breakout rooms. A study by Sharmin and Zhang (2022) found that students enjoyed the use of BRs as long as they actively participated in doing the assigned tasks.…”

“…Despite a large body of research investigating the uses of Zoom application for online learning and its benefits across disciplines (Correia et al, 2020;Sharmin & Zhang, 2022;Venton & Pompano, 2021) and in ELT (English Language Teaching) in particular, there is a paucity in the studies on the use of Zoom to enhance self-efficacy. In the ELT context, the use of Zoom and its BRs was responded positively by students (Bamidele, 2021), increased learners' interactions and engagement (Kohnke & Moorhouse, 2022), increased attendance and speaking participation (Lee, 2021;Nisa et al, 2021), and developed creativity (Putri & Yosintha, 2022).…”

Achieving online dialogic learning using breakout rooms

“…Two very recent studies have aimed to start closing this gap. Sharmin and Zhang (2022) looked at weekly and end of term feedback from a class of 330 students and found a more mixed response from students, with many expressing positive feelings towards breakout room usage, but an average of 47% of students each week expressing negative feelings. In Tsihouridis et al's (2021) study of 327 students, a more positive overall response was identified particularly in giving the opportunity to communicate and discuss.…”

“…However, it also identified those in their first year of study (freshmen) were more content with the use of breakout rooms due to the social benefits they brought than those in later years of study. Both of these studies also identified a participation challenge, with the identification of student frustration with non-participative group members (Sharmin and Zhang 2022;Tsihouridis et al 2021).…”

“…In the traditional classroom, tutors regularly make use of small group discussions to effectively scaffold conversations between learners. To maintain this peer-to-peer dialogue, following the large-scale movement to online teaching during the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, tutors turned to the technology that could enable this and the use of breakout rooms drastically increased (Sharmin and Zhang 2022). In practice, particularly when used for large scale teaching, the success of breakout rooms has been variable.…”