Using Microsoft Teams for Office Hours

Overview

Microsoft Teams has virtual meeting functionality, similar to Zoom, called "Teams Meetings." Teams Meetings are integrated into the Teams platform, including housing the meeting invite, notifications, chat, and recording link all in one place. Also, a meeting link can be posted to a Team channel to quickly invite all members of a Team to the meeting. This can be a very useful way for instructors to conduct Office Hours meetings, since everything is kept in one platform and the number of tools in a course is minimized (no Zoom).

For instructions on how to set up a Team for a course, please see Setting up Microsoft Teams.

Teams Meetings/Office Hours

If you would like to use Teams Meetings for your Office Hours, refer to the following information:

  1. Schedule a meeting and add it to a channel (see the "Make it a channel meeting" section of the linked article).
      • This could either be a channel specifically for Office Hours (a separate channel added for this purpose) or to the corresponding module channel (i.e., the Module 1 Office Hours added to the Module 1 channel).
      • Meetings scheduled this way will NOT need to list all the students in the Required Attendees field - only other instructors who may need to be able to host the meeting should be listed as Required Attendees.
  2. If you would like, record the meeting. If you added the meeting to a channel, the meeting recording will appear as a reply to the original meeting post within the channel, thus keeping everything threaded and organized.
  3. If you plan to award points for students who attend Office Hours, you can download an attendance report to view a record of who attended the meeting.
Was this article helpful?
0 out of 0 found this helpful