Participant Engagement
Chat | Breakout Rooms | Zoom Polling and Quizzes
Zoom provides a variety of tools to make your meetings and webinars more interactive, dynamic, and collaborative. Whether you're hosting a class, event, or group discussion, features like polling, quizzing, and breakout rooms can boost engagement and ensure active participation.
Chat Feature
The Zoom Chat feature allows participants to send public or private messages, share files, and post links during a meeting, making it easy to collect questions, encourage interaction, and support real-time collaboration. With Zoom Chat, participants may choose to message an individual, a small group, or all meeting participants.
Note: Hosts can't see private chats between participants or group chats that they are not a part of. Additionally, if the host saves the chat, private messages between participants do not appear on their chat transcript.
For a full overview of chat capabilities, see Zoom’s Chatting in a Zoom Meeting help article.
Breakout Rooms
Breakout rooms allow the host to split a Zoom meeting into smaller, isolated sessions—ideal for small group collaboration, discussions, or workshops.
Key features:
- Up to 50 breakout sessions per meeting
- Participants can be assigned automatically or manually
- Hosts can allow participants to select their own breakout room
- Hosts can move freely between rooms to facilitate discussions
Breakout rooms are fully separated in terms of audio and video from the main meeting, offering a focused and private environment for group interaction.
Resources
Zoom Polling
Polling allows you to gather feedback, test knowledge, or collect opinions during your meeting using single-choice or multiple-choice questions. Polls can be launched live and set to collect responses anonymously if desired. After the meeting, you can download a detailed report of poll results.
See the Conducting Polls in Meetings help article or watch the Polling for Zoom Meetings or Webinars video for more information.
Advanced Polling and Quizzing for Meetings
Advanced Polling enhances the standard polling feature by adding more question types, such as matching, ranked choice, short answer, and long answer. You can also assign correct answers to turn your poll into a quiz for knowledge checks or assessments. Polls can be conducted anonymously and detailed reports—showing each participant’s responses and timestamps—are available after the session or can be enabled during the meeting.
See the Conducting Quizzes in Meetings help article for more information.