Groups within a class

[James_Waring]

In my school, and I'm guessing most other schools we have year groups who do the same work and assignments, but are taught by different teachers in different classrooms. I have set up Classes as individual Year Groups, uploaded files and assigned assignments. The issue is that 2 different year 7 students might have 2 different teachers but be part of the same Year 7 Class in Teams. Therefore, when the teacher is looking to grade the work they have to manually pick out their students from the list of those who have turned it in. 

It seems like the only work around is to have different classes for each Teacher (for example 7A and 7B) The issue with that is that they will contain the same things, and therefore we're doubling up on the work we're doing if we're creating two separate teams. 

It would be great if there were an option create groups within classes, so you can then filter the students according to the group they're in. 

Am I missing something?

[#2]

I would really appreciate to know whether such functionality is available by now (November, 2020).

[#3]

@sum-sam AFAIK not yet.

There are some workarounds. You can allocate an assignment to specific learners in your class. You can therefore allocate it to the learners in a particular group. Unfortunately you still need to select those learners individually. Teams does allow you to add tags to learners (members) but unfortunately the tags cannot be used to assign assignments.

In addition to the workaround I have proposed, you can consider adding a prefix to the Learner's display name to identify them better. This obviously needs to be done in your Active Directory or Office 365 User Admin - it cannot be done in Teams.

[#4]

You can try creating private channels within a Class team. This will let the groups have their own space within the same team.
The only issue is some teams functionality doesnt fully support private channels, like Planner for example.

[#5]

You could upvote this Uservoice idea:  https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/599053-schools-and-universities/suggestions/40104394-use...

It is annoying that it is possible to tag member groups, but it can't be used for features like Assignments, creating Calendar meetings, Private channel membership, Breakout rooms in meetings, permissioning of files, etc. Perhaps if each tag generated a sub-group of members (Team Name-Members-Tag) they could be referenced in these other environments.

[#6]

@millerblair Agreed. I made the same comment here: Expanding the use of Team Member tags - Microsoft Tech Community

There are two User Voice suggestions which are very similar, essentially referring to the same thing.