Create a team per class or team per subject?

[FrankGriffin]

Hello, I'm looking for some advice re creation of teams in a college. Is it best practice to create a team per class with a separate channel for each subject the class are studying or should I create a separate team for each subject?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@FrankGriffin Hi Frank, I have no experience using Teams edu but this is Best practices for school leaders creating teams and channels in Microsoft Teams for Education 

[#3]

@ChristianBergstrom

Thank you, I had read that, I would be interested in hearing from someone in education who has implemented teams for a group of students. 

[#4]

@FrankGriffin I am not a teacher, but have been supporting a few local schools since COVID19 forced schools to close. There is no right answer to your question, it depends on a few things. I have worked with elementary school teachers who decided to create one team per class and a channel for each subject. Their reasoning was that it will be easier for the young kids to navigate within one team vs. multiple teams. Those ES teachers used the classnotebook to store content, but they did not use the assignment / grade functionality. I have also worked with teachers who created a team per subject (e.g. Culture Studies) and channels per topic (Italy, France, etc.). They used the classnotebook as well as the assignments. I recommend that you create a test Team for yourself and check out all the features of the classnotebook. Once you have a clear idea how you want to organize your teaching content and how to deliver it to your students you will likely figure out yourself if a Team per subject or a Team for the whole class with a channel per subjects is better. One thing to keep in mind: every member (student) in your team will see all channels and all its contents. If you teach mainly math to 5 different classes, then you will want to create 5 different teams. Otherwise it will get hard to use in the long run, especially when you start giving assignments. Hope this helps. 

[#5]

@FrankGriffin If you want to hear from teachers I recommend the Facebook group Microsoft Teams for Education. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1510337702394981/

It is a very interactive group and you will likely get good answers there. 

[#6]

@Antje Lamartine 

I will support @FrankGriffin's answer.  Your question is "cultural-based" around best practise which will depend greatly on how you manage the lifceycle of that content for the team, inc. policies, procedures, records, security, etc.  Although this will be different from one school, college or Univeristy to another, getting their personal successes and failures in practise will be like gold to you.

A big thank you to @FrankGriffin as I did not know this Facebook page existed, very useful to know.

[#7]

@FrankGriffin 

If you want to automate the procedure I'd recommend looking at School Data Sync.

https://sds.microsoft.com/

This will allow you to auto create teams based on subjects along with assign staff and students based on data in your School Administration System.