This guide explains how to schedule a Teams Meeting in a Blackboard Ultra Course. Please enable the MS Teams Meeting tool in the course before following the steps in this guide.
Set up a meeting
- Click on the Microsoft Education link to access Teams.
2. If prompted, click ‘Sign in’: Please note – this must be your University of Reading login, and not an alternative account.
3. Schedule a meeting by clicking on New meeting:
4. Enter details for the meeting like a name, the start and end dates and times, and description.
5. You can use the Add entire class (1) function to invite all students to the meeting. This will also add all instructors to the attendees list. Alternatively you can specify individual users in the invite required attendees field. Invited users will see the meeting in their Outlook and Teams calendars. The meeting will not show in the Blackboard Course Calendar.
6. Selecting Allow anyone in the course to join (2) pins the meeting in the Blackboard course for anyone who is enrolled and has permission to see it. The integration validates attendees against the course roster as they click to join (the meeting will not appear on their calendars unless they are explicitly invited). Students can still see and access the meetings set up with ‘allow anyone in the course to join’ via the ‘Upcoming meetings’ link. This might be useful for scenarios where students need to attend an alternative seminar, for example.
7. To make your meeting a recurring meeting series, click the Make Recurring button (3) and use the Repeat dialog to set how often and for how long the series should occur:
8. Your meetings will appear in the Upcoming list of Teams Meetings, your Outlook calendar and the Outlook calendars of the attendees.
9. Join the meeting by clicking Join. You can edit the meeting’s details within Teams or Outlook.
Our guidance, Inviting multiple or all students on an Ultra Course to a Teams Meeting, explains how you can download a list of student email addresses from RISIS and paste into a Teams Meeting invite. You might find this useful if you’re setting up a meeting from within Teams or Outlook, rather than via the Blackboard integration.
Manually sync the course roster
When you first activate the Microsoft Education integration in a Blackboard course, a behind-the-scenes Microsoft group is created. This ensures that the students and instructors enrolled on the Blackboard course are synced with Microsoft, enabling the ‘add entire class’ functionality to work.
As students are enrolled/unenrolled from your Blackboard courses, their enrolment will be automatically synced to the Microsoft group. Unenrolled students will no longer be able to see meetings set up in the course in which they were previously enrolled.
The sync can take up to 24 hours. You can manually force a sync by following these steps:
- Click on your profile picture and choose Course settings
- 2. Click Sync roster
Please note: Do not click on Delete course. This will delete the Microsoft group and cause the integration to no longer work.
Guide last updated on September 17, 2025