For Instructors - Getting Started with Teams

Welcome to Teams!

Teams is a useful option for delivering synchronous (live) lectures or facilitating course discussion and is available to all members of the Brock community. This guide will offer a focus on information that's most helpful to a Brock University instructor.

FAQs and steps

Access Teams

Teams is available to all members of the Brock community via https://teams.microsoft.com/.

Log in with Brock email

Enter your Brock email into the Microsoft login space:

Log in with Brock credentials

Enter your full Brock email and password to complete login. Note that you may not be required to take this step if you've logged into Brock services recently.

Create a Teams space for my class

Microsoft Teams sites for courses will automatically remain synchronized with your course's enrollment. Teams sites of this type can be requested by course instructors as listed by the Registrar (or Instructor of Record) using the steps at Create a Team or the button below:

Create a Teams site

Note that sometimes up to one business day is needed for a new Teams space to be constructed.

Though Brock community members are able to create Teams sites for projects and collaboration without course enrollment, these steps are recommended for instructors that wish to teach with Teams.

Schedule a class meeting in a Teams space (and invite the class)

Once you've created a Teams space for your course, it will be possible to quickly invite your students to single or recurring class meetings using features within Teams.

Information about steps to doing so are available within the Invite students to a Teams class meeting page.

What computer hardware do I need to teach with Teams?

Instructors are empowered to create Sakai spaces for upcoming courses using steps at Create a new course site. Mainly to respect academic freedoms, sites are rarely pre-created for instructors.

Most members of Brock faculty or staff are able to create sites on demand, though only instructors of courses (aka Instructors of Record) are able to include student rosters as part of site creation steps. Some additional discussion of this is provided within the Before you begin section.

It is sometimes also useful to create a project site to test Sakai's features in a low-risk setting or to prepare course content in advance of sharing with a formal course site.

What information should I give to students?

Yes! It is often quite useful to create a new space to begin planning your site, as steps to adding your students, once you're formally understood by Sakai to be the course's instructor, are quick.

Try these steps to Create a new course site without students. Note that you'll be able to add your students closer to the beginning of your course's beginning.

Or consider creating creating a project site.

Start a class meeting in Teams

Favourited or pinned courses will always be shown to you in your top navigation from any Sakai page and will possess a yellow next to their title. Updating your favourited courses once in a while or at the start of new terms can be handy, as it keeps your Sakai experience fresh.

To update your favourited courses, try these steps:

1. Open the menu
2. Find a course that is not yet favourited
3. Click upon the star icon
4. The course will now appear in your top navigation on any page in Sakai

Connect Teams with Sakai

Instructors, other teaching staff, or staff members in the Brock community are welcome to contact the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation for assistance with Sakai.

For speediest responses, we encourage usage of the edtech@brocku.ca contact.

A great deal of help information is also available within this space. To begin from the home page, visit https://docu.brocku.ca/.

What if I only plan to teach with Teams for a short while?

Your new Sakai site will arrive with only the essential enabled and ready to go. If you'd like leverage Sakai's ability to perform additional tasks, try taking the steps at Add tools to my site.

Some ideas about other features and their associated tools are presented in other sections of this Getting Started page.

Where can I find more help?

Though many options are available within Sakai, a common place for sharing content like course syllabi, assignments, readings, and other media with students is the Resources tool.

For steps to uploading a document, visit Upload files to Resources

A popular but optional additional measure can be to add a link to your course syllabus to your Sakai site's toolbar. Once you've uploaded a document, follow steps at Add a link to a syllabus or other document to do so.