If you want people to remain in the same group across multiple exercises in a class (for me it was 15 exercises over a 5-day project management class)
- GoToTraining will lable the groups - Group A, Group B, etc.
- Keep a scratch pad (I use OneNote) where you list who is in which group - there is no persistence in the system where it remembers who is in which group. There is near-persistence where if you keep the browser windo around after hitting "end" most of the people will stay in most of the groups.
- The thumbnails of the Group activiites are not re-sizeable, so to see hands raised, etc. you may zoom your screen out to 75% or something. You will want to re-set it for selecting, dragging, and dropping names between groups.
- If students have bad internet connections, they may drop out of the session briefly. When they come back the system will NOT reassign them back to their earlier group. Instruct the students to refresh their chrome browser until they randomly wind up back in the right group. This seems primitive, but it works. So when the student drops out it may take a couple minutes for them to come back. If they have created a back-channel (Skype, WhatsApp) for their voice communications [I recommend that practice] they can continue to talk while gettting back in the shared space.
I am trying to get a meeting with the GoToTraining development team to talk to them about the need for persistence in Breakout Groups. I don't think they ever imagined that people would be running 5-day classes with 15 exercises in their program.
