So let's say we have to do 160 students with 20 actors, I think we would have the 20 come into a room and debrief with faculty, then move them into a room with one of our actors portraying their patient. And then at some point we'd rinse and repeat. Maybe we can only do x instead of 20, but that's essentially the in-person flow I may be trying to replicate.
This would be a lot easier than trying to set up 20 rooms and control in and out times.
I've not seen anything about the 3 different centers, but I will look at our institution's documentation on those 3 versions.
One other not-hypothetical - is there any way to change your screen name after you sign in? Zoom has this.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. It all sounds theoretically possible but it will be a little bit challenging logistically. Let me see if I can walk through how it would work in WebEx.
You would schedule one session for everyone. Here's what the options look like for scheduling Breakout Sessions in WebEx Training Center:
Since you're dealing with 160 students, another 20 actors, and faculty it seems like getting this set-up ahead of time would save you a lot of trouble on the actual day. For the auto-sorting you just put in how many rooms you want or how many people you want in each room. There's also a line here which is easy to overlook but is actually quite critical: Breakout Sessions won't work correctly for anyone who uses the WebEx app on either a phone or a tablet. You really have to make sure they know ahead of time that they need to be logging in on some kind of laptop or desktop computer.
If you know how you want to set up the room assignments before the scheduled day you can also enable registration and have the room assignments set up ahead of time. That's the last option where you can assign them by name into a particular room.
Here's what the option panel looks like in the meeting:
So your third option (the first two being auto-sorting or manually pre-sorting them by name) is to assign them within the meeting itself. You create your rooms on the right and then drag the names of attendees into them. Whichever option you choose, you also get to select the default presenter. This is the person who will be able to share their screen and also end the session and return everybody back to the main meeting room.
On the day of the meeting, when everyone joins the meeting they all get put into the same session initially. You can use this to give them some general instructions. This could also be where the faculty debriefs them on the assignment before they go to their separate room to talk to the actor. Then when you click the Start button, it will sort them into their assigned rooms. The presenter in each session would be the "patient". If you want to give everyone the same amount of time, as the moderator you can click a button which will notify to all breakout session presenters that you have requested they end their sessions. When the time is up, those presenters will then end the session which returns everybody back to the main room.
If you have 160 students total and want to have about 20 in each room you should be able to have them all happen simultaneously. That divides into 8 rooms though and you said you have 20 actors . Or maybe you meant 20 students per actor? The complicating factor would be if you want to have the faculty debrief each group individually. Then you would need to assign a faculty member to each session along with your group of 20 students and your actor. The faculty could pass control to the actor once they've given their instructions and they'll be able to end the session when time is up also.
Hopefully that makes sense. We don't have any training videos for how to use this but I did a quick search and found a pretty good one from NYU:
Not all of this is relevant. You wouldn't be allowing the students to join sessions without permission, for instance, but it's helpful to see what the interface looks like. I also realize as I'm typing this out that you will need to be manually assigning people into rooms in order to make sure there's one actor per room. I'd recommend enabling registration in that case so you can get that all planned out ahead of time.
As you get further along in the planning, I'd be happy to join a training session with you at some point and see if we can talk through a dry-run scenario. Let me know! And regarding your last question, it's rather stupid but no you can't change your name in WebEx once you've joined the meeting. You would have to log out and then log in again under a different name. Not sure why that is, but that's just how WebEx rolls. We've been getting that question a lot over the last 2 weeks though.