Our current LMS system, Brightspace, provides a full set of features for all activities around teaching academic courses on campus. Microsoft Teams is a powerful collaboration tool that integrates the entire Microsoft 365 system. In some cases, instructors will want to use both systems as part of their course.
When an instructor requests a new Team for their course:
- a team is created using the Class Team template. This will prevent members from seeing the roster, and provide a locked-own folder called "Course Materials" in the General channel, in which only the instructor (team owner) can write.
- an Office 365 group is created. This can be used in Microsoft Stream to restrict viewing access to particular videos or channels
Team/Group Naming Convention
We try to closely follow the way that courses are named in Brightspace which follows the EDS course section code, over 90% of the time. These codes look like:
PSYC3200-1-R-2020W
PSYC3200-30-R-2020W
PSYC3300-1-R-2020W
PSYC4000-2-R-2020W
The template is Four Letter Course Code dash Section Number dash Session Code dash Year and Term
The "F" and "R" are "session codes", which is a Peoplesoft term that indicates which sub-part of a semester the course belongs in. There are many different session codes. Generally "R" means "the regular, full semester" and "F" means "first half of a semester".
Exceptions
In some cases, exceptions are made to the course number in Brightspace. The usual ones are:
- If instructors ask, we will merge common sections together. For example, suppose Ken wanted one site to cover both section 1 and 30 of his 3200 course. We would merge one of those sections into the other site, and it's arbitrary which site we would keep (the 1 or the 30), and which we would remove.
- If there is a teaching-assignment change, we typically don't add the new instructor to the old instructor's site. Instead we create a new site for them. Because Brightspacecourse IDs are unique and unchangeable, we resort to sticking a suffix on the end. So if Ken was replaced on section 30, we would create a new site for the new professor: PSYC3200-30-R-2020W-a
Tips for Setting Teams Permissions
When a course team is created, it is created using the Class Team template, which has the following features:
- Instructors are added as owners of the team, students are members.
- Students are not able to see the list of members (other students)
- The instructors/owners are able to setup an optional Class Notebook. A Class notebook has three sections: A course materials section which is read-only to the students (where the instructor saves material), a collaboration section (where anyone can create and edit content), and individual student notebooks which are editable by individual students and the instructors.
For more information, consult: