Using Microsoft 365 to collaborate with students

Students and staff will have access to the same features in Outlook. Students will get a new calendar function, which wasn’t a feature on post.au.dk.

We have configured Outlook so that you can still use your email to communicate with your colleagues, separately from the students’ Outlook functions.

No. The students' emailadresses will remain the same.

You can search for other users in the address book if you need to write an email or chat with them on Teams.

When the students get their new Microsoft Exchange (Outlook) email, the address book will be split into two:

• One for employees, including student assistants.
• One for students.

As an employee, you will see the staff address book by default, and only other staff members will appear in your searches. If required, you can change the address book to search for students.

Students will see the students’ address book by default and cannot write to mailing lists.

In Teams, the address book cannot be split into two, so all AU users will appear in your searches.

See how to change address books in Outlook here

Students do not have access to employee calendars, but your colleagues, including student assistants, can see the title and location of your meetings, unless you change this in your settings.

You can change the settings so that one or more students can view your calendar.

The students’ calendars are private, and you cannot view them unless they grant you permission.  

See how to change your calendar settings.

Windows

Mac

Having debated the pros and cons of staff and students having one or multiple user accounts for many years, in 2014, the senior management team decided that everyone at AU should only have one user account, no matter how many roles a person fulfills.

There are many advantages to this. 

• IT security: It is easy to remember one username and password. So only having one user account for all of AU’s systems means that staff and students are less likely to write down this sensitive information. A single username also makes it easy to use two-step verification, which in turn helps to increase security. 
• User-friendliness: As a user with a single user account, you only have one calendar to keep track of, and people who arrange meetings don’t risk inviting the wrong people. Prior to the senior management team’s decision in 2014, many AU system users had requested a reduction in the number of usernames. 
• Tracking: With only one username per person, it is easy to track each user’s activities in logs in the event of data leaks, malware attacks or similar incidents.
• Finances: It requires a lot of resources to administer multiple usernames. It also requires complex rollback technology, which would involve many development hours for AU IT. In addition, it’s likely that IT Support would receive more enquiries about forgotten passwords if people had more than one user account. 

• You are not required to use the Microsoft 365 tools in your teaching. You may choose to do so depending on the teaching activities that are relevant to your course.
• You should always clarify with your students how and when to use the various communications channels available to you: Brightspace, Teams and email.

Employees and students alike have demanded better opportunities for collaboration, which they will now have with Teams and the other Microsoft 365 tools.

Students will have the same access to M365 as teachers, which gives them more opportunities to initiate and participate in online activities. Students can share files, chat and work together on products in Word, Whiteboard, Loop and other Microsoft 365 programs.

External people can receive shared files and access Teams, which will allow students and teachers to collaborate with businesses, for example related to internships and clinical placements.

Read more about using M365 in your teaching here.

Further information at AU Educate.

It is important that you remember to use the right channel when communicating with students.

• As a teacher, you must continue to post messages in the activity feed on Brightspace. These messages are also shown on Mitstudie (mystudies.au.dk) and pushed with notifications through the Pulse app.
• You must continue to build learning spaces in Brightspace with materials such as syllabi, slides and learning activities.
• As a teacher, you can use Teams as a tool for collaborative activities in your teaching, for example for activities in which students have to work together on a file or give feedback to each other in groups.

As a teacher, you should always clearly define what will happen in Brightspace, on Teams and over email. You cannot expect students to keep an eye on various Teams rooms and channels.

• Administrative staff affiliated with individual courses must continue to use Brightspace for course-specific announcements, for example if a class is cancelled, if there is a room change, or if a course excursion is being planned, so that these announcements appear in the message feed. These announcements are also shown on Mitstudie (mystudies.au.dk) and pushed with notifications through the Pulse app.
• If you are an administrative staff member, you can use Teams to communicate with students about services, activities and other social events – and Teams can provide an online social meeting room as an alternative to groups on social media platforms such as Facebook.
• It is important that you are critical of what is communicated to students and can make clear distinctions between news feeds on studerende.au.dk, Mitstudie (mystudies.au.dk) and Teams. Messages in Teams fall under the category of Other information in the overview of communication to students.
• News and events should still be posted in the Community or course feed in order to appear on the students’ Mitstudie (mystudies.au.dk).

In your role as a student assistant, you are both a student and an employee, and you should avoid using your AU mailbox to perform work-related tasks whenever possible. Instead, you should use a shared mailbox, if your employer has given you access to this – or Workzone, if this is used in your unit. 

If you do receive work-related emails in your AU mailbox, you should organise your inbox into folders so that you can keep your student-related emails and your work-related emails separate. Work emails of a practical or social nature – e.g. newsletters or messages about a department lunch – do not need to be put in the work-related email folder.  

When you leave your job as a student assistant, you are required to delete all your work-related emails. It’s easier to do this if you’ve stored your work emails in a separate folder.  

 AU’s email policy states that, in exceptional cases, AU IT is permitted to access an employee’s mailbox. For this reason, you should always remove private and student-related emails from your inbox and store them in separate folders. AU IT never opens folders labelled ‘Private’. 

Confidential and sensitive data  

It’s important that you always process data according to its classification. This also applies to data in emails.  

 Read more about data classification  

As an employee at AU, the default sender address on your emails is your work email address. But you can set up your email so that you can switch between your work, student or shared mailbox address as your sender address. See the instructions below.

To change your sender address, simply click on the drop-down menu next to the From button and select the address you require.

There are different size limits for employee and student mailboxes at AU. When you are employed as a student assistant at AU, your mailbox may contain 99 GB of data, the same as all AU-staff. If you leave your role as a student assistant but continue as a student, your mailbox limit will return to 500 MB, the limit for student mailboxes. This happens 3 months after your employment ends.

However, you will immediately receive notifications from Outlook if your mailbox exceeds or is close to the 500 MB limit.

Therefore, as soon as you stop working as a student assistant, you must make sure your mailbox is under the 500 MB limit by deleting or downloading emails if necessary. If you fail to do this, your emails will not be automatically deleted and you will still be able to receive emails – but you will not be able to send emails until your mailbox is under the 500 MB limit. 

You can check the size of your inbox by going to webmail.au.dk -> Settings -> Account -> Storage.  

For information and IT security reasons, in your role as a student assistant, you may not use private equipment to access data owned by Aarhus University. 

This means that, if you require a computer or a telephone to perform your work tasks, you must obtain AU equipment from your manager. 

Student assistants who are only employed in service roles – such as cleaning – do not need to be issued with AU equipment.

• If you are employed as an instructor or in connection with courses at AU, you must continue to use Brightspace for messages about course information, so that the messages appear in the activity feed. These are also shown on mystudies.au.dk and pushed with notifications through the Pulse app.
• You must continue to build learning spaces in Brightspace with materials such as syllabi, slides and learning activities.
• You may use Teams in your teaching where it makes sense to do so, for example when students have to work together on a file or give feedback to each other in groups. 
• If you work as a mentor, student counsellor or in any other role that involves supporting or supervising individuals or groups of students, you may continue to communicate via email or choose to use Teams as an alternative to social media or messaging services.