I work for a community college in Canada and because of Covid-19, all our classes will be offered by video conference starting on the 23rd, which gives us a week to find a solution.
We’re looking at Microsoft Teams for this and hopefully, it can deliver. We have A3 licenses for staff and students (although students are told that the college should join Teams so they can use the whole experience but that’s for another discussion).
We have about 2000 classes that needs to be offered by video conferences. Of course, they’re not offered all at the same time, I would assume about 160 classes could run concurrently (that’s the number od classrooms we have) varying from 5 to 60 students per class.
Can Teams handle this on a A3 licence scheme? We plan on either using the classroom podium (Windows 10 with a webcam) for the teacher or teacher’s own PC if he’s quarantine at home.
Our other dilemma is how to create those video conferences? We thought of using PowerShell to create them but from what I can see, I can’t create meetings through PowerShell. Teachers will have their handful learning how to present their class through video conferencing and we would like to lend a hand their. What are our options?
We’re thinking of using anonymous meetings so they’re easy to create and only the teacher would need the Teams client to push his desktops to student running Teams from Google Chrome. Are we shooting ourself in the foot going this way?
Thanks!
So for others that might stumble onto this, it was although Teams was turned on for faculty/staff BUT NOT for students. You have to go into the old Teams admin console to activate that.
We’ve been using Teams for the last three weeks for meetings and class learning and here are our findings. DON’T create the Teams meetings for your teachers. If you do that, they will be anonymous and will lack controls over the meeting and many features like recording, screen sharing, etc.
We’ve put the Teams links the teacher created in our LMS so teachers do not have to invite students one by one but students simply click on the link to launch the meeting. Teachers do launch the Teams client but student don’t need to install Teams. They can just as well launch the meeting in Chrome and participate just as well as the Teams client, be them on Windows, Mac and even Chromebook, iOS and Android. One caveat of not sending invite to students is anonymous access must be granted and to prevent hijacking of the meetings by misbehaving individuals, have anonymous users stay in the waiting room until granted access by the teacher (can be set ahead of time and once the meeting has started.
Recording are usually available only to meeting members but you can later make them public to YOUR organization or download them and upload them to your LMS for more finite control.
So that’s it, so far Teams has fit the bill very well for us and I’m glad we chose it over other solutions like Zoom, Bluejeans (which we have license for), Webex or Connect.
Hopefully you have a similar great experience.
