MS Teams | Integration options: How to create a MS Teams team from your Brightspace

MS Teams is now further integrated with Brightspace. You can now create a team directly from your Brightspace course with automatic enrollment and synchronisation of users between the two platforms.

This article will guide you through the process of creating a team in Microsoft Teams from Brightspace to complement your Brightspace course environment. Creating a team from your Brightspace environment will allow you to synchronise the users in your Brightspace with your team in MS Teams and provide your users with a link to the team.

Create a team in MS Teams when you need 

  1. an online collaboration platform, to facilitate collaboration and group work among and with students, e.g. sharing documents, working together, organise (unsupervised) meetings. 
  2. to have multiple simultaneous meetings, organised in break-out channels if desired
  3. to share recordings of meetings held in the Team, also with students who did not attend

There are some steps requested from you to follow when using MS Teams for your official WUR course(s). This will not only ease your work and ensure consistency and clearness for students, but it will also prevent unexpected and undesired deletions when we carry platform management.  

This article will explain:

Before you start

Teams can be used in a browser or in a desktop app. We recommend downloading and installing the desktop app. 

We recommend you get comfortable with the use of MS Teams before you create your official course site. This will allow you to experiment with the possible options and plan your team ahead. Some changes and actions might leave a trace in your environment that then will be visible for students.  

MS Teams distinguishes between a team and a channel. A team is a group of people who gather together around a common goal. Channels are the collaboration spaces within a team where the actual work gets done. Each channel is dedicated to a specific topic, department, or project. 

Create your course team

Navigate to your Course Home page and scroll down at the bottom,

1. Click on Create Course Team

Create Course Team
  1. Click on Open Your Team. You will be able to open your team in the browser or in the desktop application
Open Your Team
Edit settings
  1. Tick the box Learners can create new private channels if you want to allow students to create channels
Edit settings (Learners can create new private channels)

.

Once your team is created, it will appear in the list of teams on the right side of the application window (under the icon Teams). A default channel General is created automatically.

Besides, a tab called Brightspace will link your team in Teams to your Brightspace course environment.

Created team

Your course team is now created. The class list in your Brightspace environment is synchronised with the member list in Teams. Lecturers, Courses Coordinators and Teaching assistants will become owners in Teams, while students and viewers will become members in Teams. Brightspace users with guest accounts will become guests in Teams.

The synchronisation of users runs daily. The synchronisation of users only works at team level. Users automatically have access to public channels, but not to private channels. Team owners should assign users to each private channel. Once enrolled, users will have access to the Team even if the Brightspace course has a start date set in the future. 

Member role

Members are the people in the team. They talk with other team members in conversations. They can view and usually upload and change files. They also do the usual sorts of collaboration that the team owners have permitted.

Owner role

Team owners manage certain settings for the team. They add and remove members, add guests, change team settings, and handle administrative tasks. There can be multiple owners in a team.

Guest role

Guests are people from outside of your organisation that a team owner invites, such as partners or consultants to join the team. Guests have fewer capabilities than team members or team owners, but there's still a lot they can do.

For more information about team owner, member, and guest capabilities in MS Teams click here.  

For more information about teams in MS Teams in general please visit the official Microsoft site.

You now know how to create a team in MS Teams application from your Brightspace site!