Guidance for overflow teaching with Teams

This guide provides advice on using MS Teams to deliver teaching across multiple physical locations. MS Teams should be used for interactive delivery of a lecture where participants at remote locations can join in as and when needed. 

If you wish for little to no interaction with other locations, please refer to our overflow teaching with Panopto guide.

It is essential that a colleague is scheduled to support the overflow spaces. If this is not achievable, there are security concerns with logging into the second PC, health and safety concerns with a group of students using a teaching space with no-one responsible for them, and the student experience will be impacted. 

Advantages of Teams

• Teams facilitates full 2-way communication between all locations.
• There is almost no delay between the primary room and the overflow location.
• Guest / external presenters can easily be invited to join the call remotely.
• Live captions can be auto-generated in real time.

Limitations of Teams

• A second member of staff is still required in the overflow location.
• The existing camera and microphone systems in Common Learning Spaces were installed specifically for lecture capture and are not configured to support hybrid teaching. As such, they do not capture student or audience interaction effectively without installing additional equipment (refer to point 11 in further information section).
• If you try to stream any type of video from your location to others on the Teams call, Teams will dynamically change the resolution of the streamed video. This results in a poor user experience, with jerky / difficult to watch video for those who are viewing remotely. Physical Whiteboards captured via a camera can also be compromised as well. It is best to use digital whiteboards / visualisers, wherever possible.
• Due to these limitations, it may be necessary to amend / tweak the delivery of the course content, if you wish to provide an equivalent experience for both local and remote viewers.

What to do in advance of the session 

1. Set up a Team in teams for all the people involved in the delivery of an overflow course (i.e., the lecturer(s) and the facilitator(s) who will be in the overflow room. Do not include the students.). 
2. Set up Teams to automatically send your recordings to Panopto in your Blackboard course. 

What to do in the teaching session 

1. Log in to the lecture theatre lectern PC and run Teams. 
2. Ask your colleague to login to the lectern PC in the second location and run Teams. 
3. Start a meeting with your colleague in the overflow team that you have set up. (Be aware that anyone in the Team will be notified). 
4. You will both need to check the Device Settings in Teams (via the ellipses at the top of the screen). Ensure that the audio, speaker and camera feeds match those you are using in the room.
5. Utilise “CLS Camera Control” (icon on the desktop) to check whether there is a more appropriate Camera view / preset for your session. NB. There will not be a Camera preset for an “audience view” – room Cameras were installed for lecture capture only. They do not point at the student seating.
6. You will both need to check the sound is turned up on the room audio-visual control panel.
7. Once you have confirmed that the device settings are correct, spend a couple of minutes conducting an audio test between both rooms. This is of particular importance for the primary room (if the Mic level is set too low, or too high, the viewer experience will be compromised).
8. Start recording the Teams meeting. 
9. Deliver the lecture. See Further Information (below) for various options to enhance the video call and introduce interactivity.
10. When the lecture ends, stop recording and end the Teams meeting.   

Help guides 

Creating a Microsoft Team – a best practice guide

How to change which camera Teams is using 

Panopto – How to automatically import Teams videos into a course 

Further Information 

1. Communicate with students in advance to let them know which room they will be in. All students should have some opportunities to be in the main room.  
2. There needs to be an agreed mode of communication between the person in the overflow room and the lecturer. You could chat in the team which has been set up; sharing phone numbers might be helpful. 
3. It is useful for the person staffing the overflow room to have knowledge of the content so they can interact with their audience and field any questions. 
4. Give yourself time beforehand to test the portable mics before using them. In the unlikely event they do not work, remain at the podium throughout the teaching session and log a ticket with ServiceLine afterwards. Please be aware that portable Mics are not present in every teaching space.
5. If you want to allow some (but not all) students to join the session online, they will need to be invited individually to the meeting and removed afterwards. If students choose to join with their cameras off, there may be more than one student choosing to watch the call. This cannot be prevented. 
6. Ask your colleague to turn on captions. These will not be 100% accurate but may improve the experience for some students in the overflow room. 
7. The presenter can share their PowerPoint using any of the usual Teams options, but sharing the whole screen will more easily allow the presenter to share other windows, share any sound within the slides and replicate typical lecture delivery. If you wish to use “Presenter View” in PowerPoint, ensure that you change the PC’s display settings to “Extend”, before selecting the screen that you wish to share in Teams.
8. If you need to play a video in the main room, you must ensure that you share sound from your computer and mute your Microphones (in Teams). If the video content is of any length (more than a few minutes) we would strongly recommend that you share the video independently in the Team channel, so that it can be downloaded and played locally by your colleague in the overflow location.
9. The colleague in the overflow room should keep their microphone muted until they need to speak, to avoid duplication of the sound.
10. Vevox can be used to receive questions from those in the main and overflow rooms. Another option is using the chat in a Class Team associated with the course that is being delivered (if one has been set up). It is recommended that the lecturer and their colleague have access to a second device for this (such as a smartphone, tablet, or laptop). It can be helpful to have an additional colleague in the main lecture theatre dealing with the backchannel. If this is not possible, schedule regular breaks where the lecturer can check what has come up. 
11. If students ask anything in the main room, those in the overflow room are unlikely to hear. The main speaker should therefore repeat or paraphrase the question before answering. 
12.  Avoid physical board-work if possible. If it is necessary for the course, we would recommend utilising a virtual whiteboard in Teams, the VOHP, or annotating your PowerPoint slides. Any of these methods will allow a clear capture to be streamed to the overflow location.