Creating a Microsoft Teams Meeting Link in Canvas Course Module

Tags Canvas  Teams  meeting

Overview

Microsoft Teams is an easy way to pull together a group to share, collaborate and communicate in one central location without the use of phone calls that take time away from our day or emails that can easily get buried.  From directly within Teams we can bring everyone together to share information, securely edit files live and at the same time, bring together Microsoft Office 365 apps (OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, Forms, etc) and third-party apps and websites in one place, tag members of the team in conversations or actions and customize the work through adding notes (OneNote and others) and other applications.

It is important that we continue to meet with our students regularly, whether they are on-campus or remote.  We can create a virtual office with office hours through a few steps, and settins changes - and have a consistent link for students to use when they need to meet with you virtually.

Here is how you create a Virtual Office in Teams.

For a more in-depth walk-through with Microsoft Teams, view the Tech Talk video training.

Creating a Virtual Office in Teams

Follow these steps to create a Virtual Office for your courses in Teams:

1. You can create this in any Team, however, for consistency and longevity, we recommend creating your own, private Team.  You can call it anything you wish, you will be the only person to see it.  You will want to create a Private Team, and do not give anyone else access to it.  For help Creating a Team, click here and complete the first set of instructions under "Creating a Team."
2. Once you have your Team, you have a choice to make.  Do you want one virtual office that all your students go to, or one for each of your courses that you can change each term.  If you want more than one, we recommend creating a channel for each one.  You can get help creating channels by clicking here and completing the second set of instructions under "Creating a Channel" as many times as necessary.
3. Next, you will create your meeting.  This instruction set will only cover creating one meeting, but you can repeat as many times as necessary.  In Teams, start by clicking on the Calendar icon in Teams. 
4. Next, select the first day and time of the week that you will hold office hours.  Note: This will be the only place that you will have the scheduled meeting in your calendar.  If you wish to hold office hours multiple days of the week, and reuse the same link, you can - but you will have to create it for each day of the week.  Teams calendar only lets you schedule items every day, every week, every month and so on.
5. You now have the calendar invitation screen.  Fill it out to fit your needs regarding the Title, Start and End times, and recurrence.  It is important to set the recurrence to last for as long as you want the meeting to be active.  For example, if you want to use this meeting link the entire semester, make sure the recurrence goes through the end of the semester.  Otherwise, it will not be available after that date.  The actual date and time of meetings does not matter to Teams - you can start and end them whenever you wish, but the availability of the meeting is set by when you set the meeting, and the end date.
   
   
    
6. Make sure you click the Add Channel section (where I have "Bruce's Meeting Room > General") and select the Team and Channel in the new Team you created in Step 1.  Note: By doing this, and using a private channel, anyone you share the link with can join the meeting.  But it also gives you the flexibility to record other meetings in this channel, and sharing the video.  For example, if you want to record a 5 minute video on how to do something in your course, you can.  You can start it in this channel, record it, and then it will post automatically into Stream and Teams when you are done.
7. Next, click Save in the upper-right corner to save the meeting.  This action creates the meeting in your calendar, and inserts it into the channel that you selected.
8. You will notice that section of the calender become greyed out and inaccessible while Teams works. It can take 1-5 minutes for the meeting to be accessible in the Teams calendar.  Once it is, we need to click on it to open it up again.
9. Once the meeting is open again, click on the Meeting Options link towards the top of the dialog box.
   
10. This will open a web page with your meeting options on it that you can set to help customize your meeting(s).
    
     
11. You will want to select "Who can bypass the lobby?" and change it from Everyone to Only me.  This means that students will only be allowe into your "office" when you admit them.  Until you are ready for them, they will wait in the lobby.  In the lobby, they will access to the text chat - but not the meeting itself.  This allows you to post information to the chat as needed, but also to preseve the privacy of the meeting you are having with the current student without worrying that someone will just pop in out of nowhere.
12. Once you are done here, click Save.
13. Now, you have your Office set and ready for students - next, you need to post the link where your students can access it.  That is achieved by going into the meeting, copying the link (right click on the "Join Microsoft Teams Meeting," left-clicking Copy) then pasting the link where you need it.  For help doing this, and creating the link in your Canvas module click here for instructions (Options 2 and 3)

Now you have a recurring meeting, that can be used whenever you wish, and over and over by your students for a "Virtual Office" and "Virtual Office Hours."