Microsoft heard the requests of various meeting organizers – including educators – who wanted a way to prevent participants from talking to each other during meetings.
A Microsoft engineer explained in the Teams user feedback forum that Teams now includes the ability to disable and enable chat during a meeting: the company has also published a support note explaining how meeting organizers can control chat during meetings.
Previously, a domain admin could create a policy to block chat in all video meetings. However, the people who started a meeting could not disable chat in it.
A teacher who is required to use Microsoft Teams complained that he couldn't turn off chat. With so many teachers conducting remote classes during the COVID -19 pandemic , this is an understandable request from educators.
The original request, posted in March 2020 at the beginning of the first lockdown, appears to have been submitted by someone organizing meetings and not by an educator.
“Allow the meeting organizer to temporarily disable chat during a meeting. We often see people so focused on chat that they don’t pay much attention to the actual meeting. We would like to be able to disable chat at the beginning of the meeting and then enable again when we want,” the request said.
However, many of the most recent requests were made by teachers who experienced difficulties in controlling their online courses .
“A teacher should be able to on or off ,” another anonymous user said on January 23.
“Chatting during the meeting is distracting to students, especially younger ones,” wrote another Teams user.
At its last count in October 2020, Microsoft said it had 115 million daily active users on Teams. Zoom presents its numbers differently, saying in November that it had 300 million daily meeting participants, but signaling its continued popularity , its revenue in Q3 2020 was up 367% from a year ago.
Information source: zdnet.com
