Teachers can soon prevent students from unmuting themselves in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams for Education is working on a new ‘Hard Audio Mute’ feature. This feature will prevent participants muted by meeting organizers from unmuting themselves, a new roadmap entry confirms this development. This feature will start rolling out to Microsoft Teams for Education customers in September 2020.

The roadmap description reads:

“Gives meeting organizers the ability to mute one to many meeting participants while removing the muted participants' ability to unmute themselves.”

The ‘Hard Audio Mute’ feature in Microsoft Teams for Education will provide teachers with the ability to mute several students at the same time.  Furthermore, this feature will also prevent students who have been muted by teachers from unmuting themselves.

Teachers around the world have been requesting this feature for some time. The on-going pandemic has caused schools and colleges to transition to distance-learning. But at times, distance learning is creating problems for teachers.

Teachers often complain some students cause disruptions during live meetings, something Microsoft is now trying to address with its upcoming ‘Hard Mute’ feature. It remains to be soon how Microsoft will implement this feature in Teams for Education.