Running live tutorials in Teams

Guidance on how to run live tutorials, best practice on how to use the lobby and record sessions

Join the session yourself

As the organiser and host of a teaching session, you will have scheduled the Teams tutorial or meeting in advance. To join the session, find the meeting in either your Outlook Calendar, or the Calendar view in Microsoft Teams. Click on the meeting and click Join.

When teaching, try to enter the Teams meeting a little early. This is an opportunity to double check your audio and video. It also gives reassurance to students that they have found the right place.

Admit participants from the waiting room.

Students who are not signed in to Office365 or Teams when they join the Teams meeting will enter the waiting room as Guests and have to be manually admitted to the event. This may also apply if your Teams event includes external guests, e.g. NHS staff.

When a Guest arrives in the waiting room, you will see a message in the centre of the screen and you will have to select "admit". If there are lots of Guests, you can admit them from the participants list.

You should encourage your students to sign in to Office365 before joining the meeting as admitting multiple Guests could be a security risk, you may not be able to be sure who they are and Guests have limited functionality. Guests will only see the text chat during the meeting. They may also be unable to access any hyperlinks to Office 365 documents you share during the session.

Participant chat

You can send a written message to participants. Other participants can also send messages. Click the Show Conversation button to open the chat panel.

Some teachers find participant chat distracting and difficult to handle. You should set expectations at the start on how students should use chat and how you will respond. Text chat is good for asking questions, answering questions, and sharing links. Remind students that chat should stay on-topic and appropriate.

Live Captions and Transcripts

You view live automated captions during your live tutorial, each person wanting to view the captions has add them to their view. Guidance on this is included in the Captions and Transcription drop-down of the general Teams meeting guidance.

You can also add captions to recordings and guidance is provided below.

Record the session

Before starting to record a session you should inform your students. You should also note that Teams recording does not include any privacy filters and names, chat and any video will all be included in your recording. If you need greater privacy options on your recordings you should use Collaborate.

You can start a recording at any time during the session.

At the top of the window, click the … (three dots) to open the More Actions menu.
Click Start Recording. A banner will appear at the top of the window to state that recording is happening. You should let participants know that the session is being recorded.
To stop recording, click … again, and choose Stop recording.
A link to the Teams recording will appear in the meeting chat. For a long recording, this link may take some time to appear.
For Teams Meetings held in a Channel, the recording will be stored in the Team and channel. For Meetings where you invited everyone directly, without a channel, the recording will be stored in your OneDrive, in a folder called 'Recording'.
Wherever the recording is stored, a link to the location will appear in the meeting chat. For a long recording, this link may take some time to appear.
For meetings recorded in a Channel:
- Recordings will be deleted at the same time the Team is deleted.
- Currently although live captions can be watched during the session, no transcription will be made. This means that users watching the recording will not be able to view captions. This is a limitation and Microsoft have said this will be fixed soon.
You can copy recordings to other services if you need the recordings to be available outside the lifespan of the Team or would like the session to be automatically captioned.
- Move recordings to Media Hopper Replay and add captions
- Move recordings to Media Hopper Create and add captions

Small discussion groups in breakout rooms

In a larger teaching event, you may want to split students into smaller groups for discussion. You do this by opening a number of breakout rooms.

Only the Meeting Organiser can manage breakout rooms, opening and closing rooms while the event is live.

For detailed instructions on using breakout rooms in Teams, see the advice on Breakout Rooms.