How do I use MS Teams meetings without creating a Team, using the Microsoft Education LTI?

Question

I have been testing the Microsoft Education LTI, and noticed that, when adding students to a Teams meeting, it creates a new Team in which the students are members, which gives them default permission to do a lot of stuff in the Team. OR… is it the OneDrive component that creates the Team?

Is it possible to create a Teams meeting that does not create a Team?

If the answer is "you can't" - does anyone have any tips I can provide to teachers on how to lock their Team/s down so students can't access them if they go to Teams in a browser or the app?

adam_c_voyton · Answer

By default, a Teams site created through the Microsoft Education (ME) LTI expires after one year, so that aspect is largely self-managing. If your institution archives expired or deleted Teams sites through a third-party service, however, the resulting increase in storage consumption is definitely something to consider, particularly if storage costs are a factor.

At our institution, we were only backing up manually created Teams sites used mainly by non-faculty/staff, prior to implementing the ME LTI. Once we rolled out the integration, the number of Teams sites in our tenant—and the files contained within them—increased significantly, which in turn expanded the volume of data being backed up well beyond what we had originally planned and budgeted for.

One thing that makes the Canvas and ME LTI ecosystem unique is the level of collaboration required between Microsoft 365 administrators and Canvas administrators. My recommendation would be to start small and expand as you gain experience, and have those teams meet regularly to review issues, assess adoption trends, and evaluate future changes to grow adoption.

At our institution, we're currently using only four of the eight available ME LTI apps/features: Teams, OneDrive, Reflect, and Insights (the analytics component that aggregates data from other enabled ME features).

Since Teams sites are only created when an instructor actively synchronizes a Canvas course with Microsoft Teams, the overall impact has been fairly low in our experience. Unless the course design explicitly incorporates and explains the purpose of the Teams site, many students either aren't aware it exists or simply choose not to use it.

We've already retired the standalone Teams and OneDrive LTIs and fully migrated to the ME LTI since the newer integration consolidates those capabilities into a single package.

If you decide to implement ME LTI, I'd strongly recommend establishing a retention policy and communicating it clearly to instructors. Otherwise, they may be confused when they receive automated notifications that a Teams site associated with a course they taught is scheduled to expire within the next 30 days. Setting expectations up front helps prevent unnecessary support requests and confusion later on/manages expectations.

mae_case · Answer

We are hesitant to install Microsoft Education LTI at this point because there is just not enough documentation to clarify the specifics of how Canvas Admins and our M365 Admins can effectively manage all resulting Teams/OneDrives/SharePoints/other apps' Permissions and back-end connections that each course would end up creating. If others have any insights, they'd be appreciated!

DeonScanlon · Answer

The "Teams Meetings" LTI (along with OneDrive, Office365 and anything else) is about to be deprecated (September), which means, as far as I can see, that the only way to create a Teams meeting will be via the Microsoft Education course menu item.

I had a further test of this, and found that the new LTI does not appear to create a Team - it must have been the OneDrive option that I had also selected that did this. Having an accessible Team created for students, who have full "member" access with no limitations by default is problematic, because it simply makes more work for teachers. Hopefully someone here is aware of a way to manage this effectively (or can explain what I am doing wrong!).