Did you know you can use Teams to host webinars, town halls, classes, and more? Depending on your audience size and meeting complexity, Teams offers a variety of meeting options to help you reach a wider, more engaged audience.
Discover what you can do with each type, so you know which one is best for different use cases at Northeastern.
Standard Teams Meetings
Faculty, staff, and students can use the standard Teams meeting to create an event that starts immediately or on a future date. Key features include screen sharing and breakout rooms for greater collaboration. While standard Teams meetings allow for up to 1,000 attendees, they’re typically used for small to medium-sized meetings, small-group collaborations, or one-on-one discussions.
Tip: Consider creating breakout rooms to help foster connections and create meaningful discussions in medium to large Teams meetings. The room settings are flexible and customizable, allowing you to rename breakout rooms, set time limits to keep your meeting on track, appoint breakout room managers, assign and reassign people to rooms, and more. Note that if you’re recording a meeting, you’ll need to manually start the recording in the breakout room.
Webinars
Teams webinars allow for a more structured, interactive event for up to 1,000 attendees. Teams offers a variety of tools to enhance your webinars, including:
- Registration: create registration forms to help organizers see who’s signed up or compose simple questionnaires before the meeting takes place.
- Branded themes: add images, banners, and color themes to your event.
- Presenter bios: include photos and bios of presenters.
- Webinar reports: gain insights before and after your event with details about attendance and engagement.
- Interactive features: engage with your audience through polls.
- Presenter tools: use PowerPoint Live, the cameo feature, and presenter mode.
- Co-organizers: designate up to ten co-organizers to help manage the event.
Tip: If you’re planning to use the chat feature, consider assigning a secondary moderator to monitor posts in the chat. Ask them to summarize the questions at relevant intervals and encourage other experts in the audience to chip in with answers. This way, you can stay focused on presenting the content while making sure attendees’ questions are answered and that they stay engaged.
Town halls
If you’re hosting a university-wide meeting or large event, use Teams’ town halls. These meetings are designed and optimized to provide a polished environment for presenters to connect with viewers across an organization. They provide high-quality, produced events for up to 10,000 attendees, but without large-scale audience participation; attendees can only use the Q&A feature and are unable to turn on microphones or cameras.
Town halls include several tools to enhance the experience for both presenters and attendees, including:
- Switching feeds: switch between different video feeds, including presenters and shared content.
- Q&A panel: allow attendees to submit questions, which can be moderated and answered live.
- Demonstrations: conduct live demonstrations or walkthroughs of software or processes.
- Live captions and subtitles: enable live captions and subtitles to make the event more accessible to a wider audience.
- On-demand access: Provide a recording link for on-demand viewing.
- Reactions: allow attendees to use reactions (like thumbs up or applause) to provide instant feedback.
- Event insights: use analytics to understand audience engagement and participation.
Tip: Town halls don’t include registration—meeting invitees receive a direct link via email which they can forward to others.
Classes and lectures
Instructors and faculty can use Teams for online classes and lectures for up to 1,000 participants. A Teams class allows teachers to lead meetings, assign tasks, and distribute class materials. Lectures are similar except they allow participants to chat and interact before, during, and after the meeting. During a Teams class, students can only chat and interact during the meeting itself.
Tip: Click on “show participants” in the meeting control panel to view which students have joined and those who haven’t.
Whether you’re hosting a small team meeting, an interactive webinar, or a large town hall or class, Teams provides the tools and features to ensure your event is engaging and successful. By understanding the unique capabilities of each meeting type, you can choose the best format to foster collaboration, enhance communication, and achieve your goals at Northeastern.