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Faculty will find that Teams have been created in Microsoft Teams for their Summer Sessions this week. These Teams are provided as a convenience to our faculty if they choose to use them. They are prepopulated with your students and may be deleted if you do not want them.  A professor must activate the Team for it to be available for use by students. Teams is an enhancement to our current LMS, Canvas and not a replacement.
Some articles and materials to help you:

Quick Q&A

Q: Can I use Teams as my Learning Management System and input grades, assignments and my syllabus? 
A: Canvas is the official Learning Management System for the University of Texas at Arlington, not Teams. At UTA MS Teams is an enhancement for Canvas LMS and should not be used as a system of record regarding your classes.
The following should be entered into Canvas and not Teams:

  • Syllabus Information
  • Finished files required for a grade
  • Grades

Q: What is Teams good for?
A: Teams offers our faculty and students a consistent, supported, and secure environment for synchronous and live collaborative learning; as an enhancement for Canvas LMS.

Q: Canvas has Discussions why would I use Teams?
A: Teams has more robust features and network support from an enterprise level via Microsoft. If you are having poor video quality issues Canvas Discussions and you or your audience have good network connections with broadband, Teams may present a better solution than Canvas Discussions. In addition, Teams interfaces directly with other official collaborative tools at UTA like O365 and SharePoint.

Q: Why are we using Teams instead of Zoom?
A: While Zoom has increased in use via its pop culture status during the COVID outbreak, it is not capable of the deeper integration with collaborative tools that are already a part of the UTA Application Ecosystem. Teams is catching up quickly to features in Zoom like breakout rooms and Gallery View with up to 49 tiles.

Q: I like Breakout Rooms, can I do something similar in Teams?
A: Channels in Teams can be used in a planned approach; as a Breakout Room.  They cannot be used as easily for off the cuff room creation, yet.  Channels do remain as long as the Team is not deleted, can easily be used for group assignments and can be made viewable to only the people assigned to them.

Lee • 2020-May-21

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