With seminars being run online, It’s necessary to be able to schedule meetings with your seminar groups.
This year, Seminar Groups won’t be automatically populated in Microsoft Teams like they are in Moodle. However, you have a few options for how you can establish Seminar Groups in Microsoft Teams.
Creating a Channel in Teams for each Seminar Group
Using Channels in your Teams is a great option, as it offers you the most flexibility. You’ll need to create a Public (standard) channel for each group, due to the fact that currently Teams meetings can’t be scheduled with private channels.
Creating a Channel in Teams Video
You can then schedule meetings with these Channels when you are organising seminars. Students will have each of the seminar meetings added to their calendars.
Scheduling a Meeting in Teams Video
Public Channels are open to all students in the Team. This has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that if you need to reallocate students do a different Seminar Group, it’s as easy as telling the student to use a different channel.
The disadvantage is it means you’ll need to be clear to students which Seminar Group they are in, to avoid them attending the wrong seminars. You could just tell the students, but you could also use Access Restrictions in Moodle.
Sharing Teams Meeting Links with Access Restrictions in Moodle
We suggest using Channels in Teams, but if you really didn’t want to, you can also use Access Restrictions in Moodle to share the Teams Meeting Links with your students. Just be aware that, as we have guest access to meetings enabled in Teams, students won’t be required to log in when they join the meeting. Instead, they’ll appear as guests if they don’t login.
Sharing a Teams Meeting Link Video
When setting the Access Restrictions, you can set the restricted resource to be visible, but greyed out. Or to be entirely hidden if the student doesn’t match the restriction. Hiding the resource will save some confusion in this case. Simply click on the eye icon in the access restriction setting so that it has a strike through it.
Further Resources