Microsoft Teams for Academic Courses (Naming Convention)

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 Brightspace​​​​course 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:

 

Print Article