Overview
This document refers only to academic courses that have a formal enrollment process through eservices (ISRS). It does not refer to Teams that might be created for other uses, such as a Chemistry club with a faculty advisor, or any Team that is manually created by a faculty member who then adds students from an academic course or any other members to the Team.
This document refers to Class Teams as a supplement to teaching courses that may exist in D2L Brightspace, are hybrid, or are taught face-to-face.
Class Teams Automated Creation Process, Enrollments
Each school decides to participate in the automated creation of Class Teams. If a school participates, the process is as follows.
Automated Process
- Microsoft’s School Data Sync (SDS) takes the student enrollments in an ISRS course and creates a Team with those students as members, and the teacher(s) as the Team owner(s).
- The teacher will see a list of academic courses in Teams, and can choose to create a Class Team for each course (see Activating your Microsoft Class Team).
- Unless the teacher creates the Class Team and makes it active, students will not see the Class Team.
Enrollments: Frequency and Maintenance
- The Class Team membership is kept in sync with the ISRS enrollments in the course, so the teacher does not need to make these changes manually.
- Changes to student enrollments or instructor assignments will be processed once a day, at night.
- Unlike D2L Brightspace courses, LDA entries in ISRS will not remove the student from the Class Team.
Class Team ownership, responsibilities, and usage
- For courses that have multiple instructors assigned in ISRS, every instructor will be listed as an owner of the Class Team.
- To adhere to FERPA requirements, faculty should not add any members to the Class Team who are not enrolled in the course in ISRS. TAs may be added if they are designated to assist the faculty with teaching the course.
- The Class Team owner(s) can utilize features such as Class Notebook, Assignments, and Channels to supplement their teaching of an academic course.
- These features can be used for course material delivery, student learning activities and assessments, and student-to-student as well as student-to-teacher interaction.
- NOTE: A Class Team exists independently of D2L Brightspace courses; there is no connection between the two platforms (unless you create a Class Teams Assignment).
Tracking Student Attendance and Academic Activity
Federal Financial Aid requires evidence of student attendance, student learning and assessments, and evidence of student-teacher interaction to be tracked and reported locally by an institution. Outside accrediting agencies (such as HECB) also need this information when reviewing programs and institutions for maintaining accreditation. Data may be requested as far as 5-7 years back.
- Instructors need to be aware that reporting is not available for Microsoft Class Teams.
- This type of information can only be gathered manually by the teacher reviewing the student activity in Class Teams.
Class Teams Retention and Archive Schedule
Once a year, Class Teams created by the automated process will be archived.
- Archived Class Teams are not accessible to students, but faculty retain the ability to reconstitute the archived Class Team to review it.
- At this time, there is not a policy or schedule for purging (permanently deleting) Class Teams.
Technical Support for Class Teams
- Class Teams support can be found on the Microsoft Support website.
- Faculty and students can seek assistance from their local IT support.
- When a campus runs into a problem they cannot solve, they may escalate the issue to System Office IT Service Desk.