We will create Microsoft Teams for each Winter-Spring 2024 Brightspace course space starting on Thursday, December 14th. While most courses will be meeting in person, many faculty and students have expressed interest in using course teams for collaboration and discussion outside of class meetings. Other classes may be held in hybrid or online form and will be using Teams for online course meetings. Additionally, creating teams for all courses prepares UVM for possible shifts in course delivery if circumstances require.

If you don’t want to use Microsoft Teams with a class, just hide it. If you don’t activate the team, students won’t see it at all. Please don’t delete course teams (see below).

Winter-Spring 2024 course teams

The Winter Session 2024 begins on December 26th. To make sure instructors have time to prepare their teams, we will begin syncing Winter and Spring course membership from Brightspace to create and update Microsoft Teams on Thursday, December 14th. These new course teams will appear at the bottom of your current active teams. You can rearrange your teams list to your preferred order.

Important additional points:

• Students can’t see or access a team until an instructor activates the team. This is a one-way operation; we can’t deactivate a team if you activate it.
• Instructors can add content and set up their course team prior to activation.
• If you plan to schedule meetings in your course team, please wait until the team has been activated or students will get errors when they try to access the meeting or team.
• Please don’t activate course teams until you are ready for students to access the content, preferably close to the start of the term.
• The sync process updates membership of class teams three times each day using data from the Registrar’s Office and Brightspace.
• If you make manual changes to your team’s membership, the automatic sync process will not make further changes for the individuals you have changed in that team (to avoid undoing your work).

Note: Please do not delete course teams.

Instead, please hide any course team that you don’t want to see. We will automatically restore class-based teams that you delete because the sync process requires those teams to be present, even if you aren’t using them. Additionally, we want course teams to follow the data lifecycle of Brightspace course spaces. We anticipate removing course teams programmatically in coordination with the removal of corresponding Brightspace course spaces.

Fall 2023 Course Teams

Teams corresponding to Fall 2023 courses will continue to be accessible through the end of December. In January, these course teams will be archived, which comprises the following changes:

• We will rename course teams with the prefix “Exp0124_” (where “0124" means January 2024).
• We will remove all students from Fall course teams.
• Course teams will move out of your list of active teams.

Course instructors can restore archived teams from within the Manage Teams screen in Teams. We have a Knowledge Base article that covers this process. The restored team will then appear in the active teams list under Hidden Teams. Course instructors can then access content and add students to the team if needed, for example to finish incomplete work. Those students will then see the team under Hidden Teams in their own view. If you or a student want to return the team to the main list of teams, simply unhide the team.

When access is no longer required, instructors can archive the team again from the Manage Teams screen.

Note: Again, please do not delete course teams. 

You may also want to take a moment to check for an updated Teams client. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the UVM Tech Team or Center for Teaching & Learning (ctl@uvm.edu).