Various groups within a course on Teams

[MayaBirch]

Hiya

We are currently starting to adopt Teams and working out the best way to set our classes. We are a college and therefore have instances where we may have various groups within a class. 

For example: 

Y1 Business Studies

- Group 1

-Group 2

-Group 3

And so on...Initially we set one overarching course and then set the groups as private channels as we want to ensure each group can only access their group. This has caused a few issues as a private channel doesnt have the same functionality as a 'normal' channel and vice versa. 

Do we really need to create a separate Team per group? I am interested to see what others do! 

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@MayaBirch 
Our District creates separate Teams for each group/section of the same course. We have a custom application that generates the Teams based on data from our Student Information System (SIS). Unfortunately, we aren't able to make use of School Data Sync (SDS) due to limits of our SIS, so Team membership is not automatically updated after the initial Team creation. Teachers (K-12) can then combine sections of the course into a single Team if they wish to administer the course in the same way to both groups. This can be done easily by adding the Microsoft 365 Group name for any additional course groups as members of the Team of the course group that is to be used as the primary Team for the course. The additional course group Teams can then be deleted after the members are added to the single Course Team. It is very difficult to segment information to different groups within a Team. Tags only work for @ mentions. The other big limitation of having all the groups combined in one course is that depending on the group sizes you can run up against the limits of Assignment distribution, though that has recently been bumped up to 300 members. In general, Assignments seem to cause the biggest issue (different due dates, tracking assessment, assigning to select students from a large group, inability to sort students) in a combined course. Some of the limitations of the private channel (no channel meetings) can be worked around (using calendar meetings inviting the channel by email address, not adding a channel) and others can't (moderation settings).

We provide teachers recommendations on ways to provide the course materials across the multiple sections without needing to upload them into each Team - Class Notebook copying existing content, Sharing OneDrive folder of Class Materials read-only with 'Manage access' to permission, and creating a separate "Course Team" without members to store resources and build SharePoint pages for video sharing that can again be shared with multiple groups by managing access to the SharePoint site.

Hope this helps.