Note: Blackboard provides the central hub for teaching and learning. Teams is supplementary to Blackboard and must not be used for:
- Core learning content,
- Essential academic module communications (do not use Teams calendar or channels for essential module communications),
- Summative assessment submission and feedback,
- Copyrighted materials, for examples scanned articles made available in the Talis Reading List.
When requesting a Team for use with students, it is recommended that staff remain the Team owner (in most cases).
Upon receiving a new Team, owners should:
- Add multiple staff owners, if there is only one.
- Manage Team settings and permissions; to check and customise student membership permissions, and prevent students from deleting or renaming channels or the Team name.
- Create channels within the Team for students to collaborate on topics or in groups
- Display a link in Blackboard for students to access the Team.
Types of Team
There are two types of Team available for use with students.
Note: a standard Team provides greatest flexibility, for reasons outlined below.
1. Standard Team
When using a standard Team with students, you can manually add members to a Team by inputting individual email addresses or Outlook groups. Anyone with or without a University email account can be added. Team owners are responsible for enrolling Team users.
2. Blackboard linked Team (auto enrol students from a single module)
Request a Blackboard linked Team
You should use a Blackboard linked Team if you want the membership of your Team to match the enrolments on a specific Blackboard course.
A Microsoft 365 Group corresponding to the Blackboard course will be used to control membership of the Team. This will ensure membership of the Team matches enrolments on the Blackboard course, inclusive of all course roles: Instructor, TA and Course Builder will become Team owners; users with other roles will become Team members.
- A Blackboard linked Team cannot be created retrospectively, DTS can only action this for new Team requests.
- Only one Blackboard course can be linked to a Team. It is not possible to link several Blackboard courses to a Team.
- The Team will take the name of the Blackboard course and must not be renamed (doing so will change the name of the corresponding Microsoft group, which can cause confusion when assigning access permissions).
- It is not possible to change membership status or delete users from the Team, as any changes will be overwritten by Blackboard enrolment status (i.e. Instructor, TA and Course Builder can only be Team owners, not members).
- It is not possible to add additional Team owners and members from within the Team, these additional users must be enrolled on the linked Blackboard module. It is not possible to add external UoR guests to a Blackboard linked Team.
- Where multiple staff have Instructor or TA roles exist on a Blackboard course, all will automatically become Team owners. The module convenor should inform them of the new Team linked to the Blackboard course, and remind staff not to delete or rename it. It may be useful for inactive Blackboard users to ‘Hide ’ the Team to avoid unwanted notifications, whilst also retaining access to the Team and Blackboard course.
Guide last updated on September 15, 2022
