Channels and threads
What kinds of channels (public and private) and how many you set up will depend on several factors. Some of these factors are covered in the use-case guides for Community building and Groupwork.
- You have the option to use up to 200 public and/or up to 30 private channels to facilitate group work. Everyone can see a public channel, while private channels provide confidentiality (with feature limitations).
- We recommend using public channels where possible. Alternatively, you can manually create separate Teams spaces for smaller groups of learners if channels in the unit space will not work for you.
There are also things to consider about when it is best to create a separate channel, or start a new conversation (thread) in an existing channel:
- Topic - Is there a clearly defined topic, which will generate multiple threads of discussion?
- Audience - will the audience be the same as an existing channel (this doesn't necessarily have to be about confidentiality, since there will be topics of discussion that are not confidential but might only be relevant to a subset of the Team)?
- Governance - will the moderation rules of an existing channel be appropriate for these new discussions? Because channels have their own moderation settings, certain topics might warrant tighter/looser moderation controls.
Building a channel structure is certainly not an exact science, and therefore reviewing a channel's analytics is a great way of assessing how much engagement a channel is getting. Consider deleting / re-purposing channels which are getting minimal engagement, and perhaps expanding / splitting channels with highest engagement into multiple channels.
