Microsoft Class Teams Now Available for the Fall 2022 Term

We are pleased to announce an update to McMaster’s Class Teams for the upcoming Fall 2022 term.  

As of August 15th, you will be able to initiate the creation of your Class Team from Avenue to Learn. Check out the setup guide on how to start using and activate your Class Teams.  Note: Class Teams will no longer be created in advance. 

Please join the Class Teams Community of Practice to stay up to date with announcements and to join weekly drop-in sessions, for any questions. 

What are Class Teams and why use them? 

Microsoft Teams is a collaborative application that allows members to communicate together in written, video, and audio formats, share files and resources and act as a complement to your Avenue to Learn course shell.  

With this update, Class Teams can be created for courses, labs and tutorials based on an Avenue to Learn course shell. Students are automatically enrolled into courses based on registration information from Mosaic. Instructors and students are added to the Class Teams via a data sync process that updates every 24 hours. Note: The sync also removes students who have unenrolled.  

Instructors can start using their Class Teams without students seeing or being able to access them until instructors decide to ACTIVATE the Team. 

Are there any changes or things of note? 

One major change with the current release of the new integration is that Class Teams can only be populated based on the information from Avenue to Learn. If a student is added in the Microsoft Teams app and is not listed in the course in Avenue, the student will be removed from the Class Team at the next sync. Students, teaching assistants, etc. will need to be added in Avenue to Learn. Click here for information about adding students manually in Avenue to Learn.

For example, if you add a student manually in Teams, they will be removed at the next sync. Similarly, if you promote someone to an owner, those permissions will be removed. A Guest user invited to join the Team within Teams will also be removed. The Team name will not be overwritten at the next sync.

What are the benefits of the Avenue to Learn integration? 

The new integration allows for cross-listed courses and multiple sections to be combined into one Class Team without the need for manual intervention.  

Additionally, only Class Teams that are required by instructors will be created as opposed to creating Teams for every section, lab, and tutorial.  

What happens to old Class Teams?  

Class Teams from the previous term will not be deleted or removed. Instructors can choose to delete, archive, or keep the previous term’s Class Teams. However, Teams/Groups will expire 180 days from the date and time the Team was last used. https://mcmasteru365.sharepoint.com/sites/discoverM365andZoom/SitePages/TOU-Teams-%26-Groups-Expirations.aspx

Archived versus deleted Class Teams  

Archiving a Team ceases all activity and changes it to a read-only state. You can still add members, search through documents, read chats etc. but all other functions will stop. Archived Class Teams can be restored later.

Click here for instructions on how to archive and restore a Team.

If the Team is no longer required, consider deleting the Class Team, which will delete all Team activity, channels, files, chat, and associated apps. Deleted Teams are retained for 30 days before being permanently deleted. Instructors/Team owners cannot restore a deleted Class Team.

Click here for instructions on how to delete a Team.