PLC Groups spanning many schools

[Marius Pretorius]

I wonder if anyone can shed light on this scenario for the use of PLC groups?

In South Africa schools are required to be part of clusters. The Grade 12 teachers of these schools are part of subject clusters. Usually there is one teacher per school belonging to such a cluster. The schools are independent of each other. There may be 10 to 15 teachers belonging to a cluster where they commonly share resources and work together on assessments.

What would be the best way to implement a PLC in this scenario? It would seem that a PLC would be an ideal tool for such a cluster. The challenge is who "owns" the PLC? Ideally it should be in "neutral space". Do I create a PLC as part of our school/organisation and then invite the others to join in? How would a PLC operate across institutions?

With our particular cluster there is currently just a mailing list to which the teachers opt in and a common DropBox space where we share files.

Would one create a new "virtual organisation" that spans these institutions, with common "ownership" and invite different subject groups to make use of this?

I don't have any authority in this matter - I'm just an educator who sees how PLC's can fill a need in this case. It will have to be tried out before one can recommend it on a wider scale.

[#2]

Sorry for such a late reply: I wonder if there is one tenant for all the schools that you mention or do all of these schools have there own O365 tenants? In the first case the answer seems simple to me: create a PLC, assign as much owners as you like and make the rest of the teachers a member.

In the second case: you should enable external access to both the PLC in order to enable external access. This should enable the users from other schools to become member. Unfortunately only registered O365 users from the originating tenant can become owner of the PLC.

[#3]

Sorry, Mike, I've just now seen your response. In this User Case Scenario, the schools are totally independent and do not have one tenant. I realise that this would actually be an ideal situation. Many of the schools may not even be using Office 365.

Perhaps the new Teams feature may resolve this issue?