Teams for Teaching – Archiving Unit Teams

As Preparation for the new academic year your unit Teams for 2022 will be archived on 31st August. This means that although the unit Teams and their SharPoint folders will still exist and be accessible, they will be set to be ‘read-only’. If you wish your unit Team to remain editable you can easily unarchive it if you are a Team owner. Please see instructions on how to do this here

Stream is changing

Microsoft is updating Stream on 10 July, moving from Stream Classic to Stream (on SharePoint). This will affect anyone using Microsoft Unit Teams to record teaching sessions.

The main changes are:

  • Recordings will now be stored directly in OneDrive or SharePoint
  • There will no longer be the ability to edit your video directly in OneDrive/SharePoint, but you can download it for editing in other tools, such as Camtasia
  • It is no longer possible to create an embed link to your recording, but you can get a link to the recording to share with people within the University.

Added features

There are some additional features to this update that may be useful to you in your teaching, including:

  • Support for chapters, to make it easier to move through a video
  • The ability to add and reply to comments alongside the video
  • Improved analytics – weekly viewership (unique & total) and viewership retention
  • Improved video thumbnails, with any point of the video able to be used as a thumbnail.

The Microsoft roadmap for Stream has more detailed information on the additional features.

Please note:

  • One-to-one or group calls and scheduled meeting recordings will be saved in the OneDrive account of the University attendee who started the recording. In order to make sure that this is not one of your students, you can set access and presenter options.
  • Unit Teams meeting recordings and files will be automatically stored in the SharePoint folder for the Unit Team.

Folder permissions:

  • All Unit Teams have been configured so that only owners can share files or recordings both externally and internally. Any attempt to share files by members of the team will send a request to the owners for approval.
  • Non-Unit Teams have been configured so that sharing files or recordings externally can only be done by an owner, but members can share files within the organisation.
  • Please also see the IT Services instructions on how to manage permissions.

Further information on the Stream changes can be found on the IT services web pages.

Teams for teaching survey – closing date 4 Feb, noon

If you have used Microsoft Teams for teaching, or might consider using it in the future, we would be grateful if you could take this survey. It should take less than five minutes. The feedback will inform future development and support for Teams for teaching.

Please also pass the link to colleagues who you think may be interested.

Take the survey or find out more about Teams for teaching.

Teams for teaching update

Teams will be part of our supported digital learning environment in 21/22. Teams offers tools for collaboration, discussion, teamwork and community building and will complement Blackboard. Blackboard remains the appropriate location for teaching materials, reading lists, learning activities, assessment activities and assessment-related information and data.

Through interviews, a short survey,focus group and our new project advisory group DEO and IT Services are establishing requirements for Teams in 21/22 and future years.

For 21/22 the project aims to create Teams:

  • for each taught unit, with students added from SITS. The spaces will be unavailable to students by default, with the option for Team owners to make them available.
  • with teaching staff added. Team owners will be able to add additional UoB staff as owners and guest users external to the University.
  • with a simple integration between Blackboard and Teams. We will work with schools to ensure this link aligns with their plans for Blackboard template and course development.

We are working with an advisory group made of of academic and professional services staff, to prioritise and deliver these requirements for Teaching Block 1, while also collating additional requirements to continue to develop and extend Teams for teaching. Examples of requests for longer-term development include functionality to:

  • enable staff to include students in addition to those enrolled from SITS (eg for co-taught units).
  • automatically create Teams for Programmes(for example for year group or all years on a programme).
  • better support activity groups (e.g. for a tutor group or other teaching activity).

As part of the project we will develop training and support materials for staff and students, as well as case studies and exemplars.

For further information, please see our project page  or email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.