Microsoft Teams Structure for Education

Introduction:

According to Microsoft Reports, more than 240,000 educational institutions are now using Microsoft Teams for remote and hybrid learning. It's not at all a surprise, since Teams help create collaborative classrooms, streamline communication, and foster engagement. Being an incredibly powerful collaboration tool, when used effectively, Teams holds the power of bringing students, faculty, and external partners together.

This blog will discuss the best practices for organizing the Teams environment in universities. It will cover the different use cases for Teams among students, faculty, alumni, and external users. Additionally, it will provide tips for managing channels and content effectively.

Different use cases for Microsoft Teams in Universities

MS Teams For Alumni:

Beyond the traditional student-faculty dynamic, universities can extend the benefits of Microsoft Teams to alumni. With the help of Microsoft Teams, you can create Dedicated Teams to engage alumni in:

• Mentoring programs
• Professional development
• Networking opportunities.

This fosters a sense of community and encourages the exchange of valuable insights between graduates and current students.

MS Teams For Students:

For students, Teams can become the digital hub that brings together educators and students to provide an enriched learning experience.

Experts consider creating teams based on specific courses, classes, or topics as best practice. Teams should engage both, faculty and students.

Students can use Teams for student clubs, social groups, or special initiatives to create a lively campus community.

MS Teams For Faculty:

Faculty members benefit from Teams as well. Develop a series of teams for different departments, schools, and administrative units. This helps teachers work together easily by sharing resources, talking about teaching methods, and organizing academic activities.

MS Teams for External Users:

Universities often collaborate with external organizations, such as research institutions, other universities, and government bodies. Create teams centered around specific projects, research initiatives, or grants to ensure smooth collaboration. By inviting external partners as guests, you can facilitate knowledge exchange and streamline communication.

Managing Channels and Team Members:

To maintain an organized environment, establish naming policies for teams, channels, and users. This practice becomes crucial due to the sheer volume of content generated in a university setting. Clear and consistent naming conventions aid easy identification and navigation within Microsoft Teams.

Utilize Private Channels:

In certain instances, sensitive discussions or confidential information may require restricted access. Utilize private channels and sensitivity labels to limit visibility to specific team members. This ensures that only relevant stakeholders can access and contribute to confidential discussions.

Harnessing the Power of Microsoft 365 Integration:

Integrating Microsoft Teams with Microsoft 365 unlocks a plethora of collaborative features. Leverage apps like OneNote, Planner, and SharePoint to create a comprehensive digital ecosystem that enhances productivity and enables seamless content sharing.

Creating and Managing Class Teams:

Class Teams offer a dedicated space for course-specific collaboration. Utilize School Data Sync to automatically create class teams based on your student information system, simplifying the onboarding process for educators and students.

Optimizing the Channels Tab:

Organize channels efficiently within teams to reflect the structure of your courses or projects. Use clear headings and descriptions to help team members easily identify relevant channels and locate specific topics.

Naming conventions:

Any educational institution will likely need to create hundreds if not thousands of Teams. Without proper naming conventions, it will be nearly impossible for anyone to find the right workspace. The best practice is to use a coding system and include suffixes and prefixes in the names of the Teams.

Naming conventions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to governance controls. Other controls include external sharing and security, the minimum number of team owners and members, who can create channels, and others.

Automation:

In a school with 20 teachers, each teaching 6 classes per semester, a total of 240 Teams is a bare minimum.

Each Team takes 45 minutes to set up, so it will take 180 labor hours to set up 240 teams. As you can imagine, this is quite overwhelming for the IT teams. So is there a better way to create new Teams, or delegate the responsibility to people outside of the IT team?

With the help of Microsoft Teams' advanced templates and controlled provisioning process, there is.

Advanced templates allow IT admins to create Teams with fully configured standard channels, tabs, and apps. Using controlled provisioning process faculty can request to create new Teams from templates.

Although advanced templates are a great solution for smaller education institutions, larger ones will need a more robust solution. Apart from creating new Teams, larger universities also need to have security, privacy, and governance controls top of mind. This is where Microsoft 365 management software can help.

Many Microsoft 365 management platforms already come with pre-built templates, let alone governance controls, automated lifecycle management, guest user management, and other features.

Check out our Microsoft 365 management software buyers guide to learn more about the pros and cons of various software providers.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Microsoft Teams for Education is a powerful tool that empowers universities to create an engaging and collaborative learning environment. By adopting a few simple Teams structure best practices, you can cater to the needs of various groups of people. Smaller institutions can leverage advanced team templates and some simple provisioning automation to optimize their Microsoft Teams usage. Whereas a larger university will likely save tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars by implementing a Microsoft 365 management software.