How to set up Miro Education if you teach multiple classes

From the All Boards page, click your team name to get to settings.

If you don’t see that, then maybe you don’t have the right permissions to the account.

Good luck!

Peter, thank you for this. It’s a problem when students can get into the boards of others. If I have students in a class working on a board, and individual students are using particular spaces on the board, is there a way that I can prevent other students from inadvertently wrecking each other’s work? thanks!

@Matt Huston - Unfortunately there is no way to stop some users from editing only some parts of the board, but not others - this level of edit permissions does not exist. However, your example sounds like a good use case for a user-level/board-level edit/locking feature. I would recommend adding this as an Idea in the Wish List category by following the guidelines here: Wish List: Everything You Need to Know.

@Katie McCormick - The additional administration of managing students as Members on your Education Plan can definitely prove to be cumbersome when moving from quarter to quarter.

First, let’s start with what the students would not be able to do if you shared a public link with Edit access, aka, Guest Editor (password protected, of course).

As per the Guest Editor help article, Guest Editors can’t [workaround for student]:

• Change board name
• Create, duplicate or delete a board
• Change board privacy settings
• Access team dashboard [student can Star the board and later get to it from their own personal, Free Plan Miro account dashboard by clicking on “Starred”]
• Access any boards except for the board(s) shared with them via a public link 
• Mention others in comments 
• Start video chat [use a third-party video chat software - MS Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, etc.)]
• Create, edit or add Asana, Jira, Microsoft Azure, or Rally cards from cards picker (however, they will be able to view them)
• Export and embed the board [teacher would have to send a copy of the board as a PDF]
• Download board backup
• Lock/unlock objects on the board
• Receive any board notifications [would be handled through of means, e.g., email]

Some pros for you

• Students will not be able to lock/unlock objects.
• Because they can’t create boards in your Education Plan team, you wouldn’t have to worry about a mass of boards each quarter end.
• Any other possible shenanigans (renaming. deleting, etc.)

Some cons for you:

• Managing the board passwords.
• The risk of the wrong person getting a hold of the board URL & password.

Some cons for the students

• Having to track/administer the list of boards (and passwords) that they have access to. I have found that what works best for this is to open a board, click the Star icon (located to the right of the board name). With this action being complete, now when they sign into their own Miro Free Plan account, they can find the board again by clicking on the Starred link from their Dashboard.

Public Guest Editor Link Considerations

• If the person using the Guest Editor link is not signed into a Miro account profile, e.g., anyone from a private/incognito browser sessions, you will see random names beside the cursor, e.g., Guest Editor, Guest Artisan. To get around this, and further to my point about managing public board links that were shared with me, each student should set up their own Miro account profile, which will of course give them a Free Plan by default. With this in place, whenever they access your Education Plan board via the public link, you will see whatever name they used when setting up their account.
• If using public links with Editing enabled, you do run the risk of either someone gaining access to the board via the link (and even password, depending on how you shared it with your students) whether it be maliciously or a joker student shared it online. If this were to happen, you would need to change the password and share it again. In the meantime, you would quickly go into the boards Share settings 

Do you have an assistant whom could manage this all for you?! 

@Sander Maijers - This is not currently possible. However, your scenario is an excellent example for a use case where a Team Admin would want to restrict board/project create access.

I’d recommend adding this as an Idea in the Wish List category by following the guidelines here: Wish List: Everything You Need to Know. If you do create a Wish List Idea post, I would also recommend that you post a link to it back here, so that future readers of this post can quickly get to and vote for your Idea. 

@Robert Johnson https://community.miro.com/wish-list-32/allow-team-owner-to-restrict-creation-of-board-and-projects-2042

Hello, thanks @Robert Johnson for your short tutorial on how to set up multiple classes on Miro education using projects as a work around. I had the same issue and it took me quite some time to figure that out. As a teacher I keep students’ boards for documentation for some time. So I cannot delete the team after each class. I used projects as a workaround but it is still likely to accidentally add wrong students or mess it up with permissions. So I would really appreciate another solution for this in the long run. 
As “several classes” is a standard use case for teachers I think the ability to add more than one team should be possible for education accounts. This would make things much easier. Do you know of any feature request /wishlist which is already asking for this? I could not find this issue in the Miro Community. 

I’m sure Miro does not want to have teachers/students adding endless teams and members. Maybe a good solution would be to allow around 6 teams? After students finish University we could delete the teams.

I’m in the US, and thus subject to FERPA. Our admin has been getting on us lately about making sure that students in separate courses are not able to have contact with each other through the tech tools we use.

In particular, they should not be able to see names/emails of people in other courses or view content they create without explicit sharing.

Now, the multiple project solution described above does seem to address the sharing issue. However, I don’t think that it meets the requirement about not being able to view names of others. For legal compliance reasons, as well as the user management reasons mentioned above, it seems like it would be much safer to have separate courses in separate education plans. 

So two questions that I have:

• Can a education plan member (non-admin) view the complete list of other members? If so, according to our legal dept, having multiple courses in the same plan is a FERPA violation.
• If Q1 answer is yes, can we apply for and own multiple education plans, so that we can comply with the requests from legal and admin?

@Grady W - By the way, I sent the Miro support team a link to this post as feedback for the Education Plan product team. This is the response:

Thank you for bringing this privacy concern to our attention. I'm going to escalate this information to the support members who work on legal, privacy, and security concerns.
 
Once I hear back, I'll send you an update.

I will update this post as I hear back from the support team.