How to organise an online meeting with free range and serendipity

The guide linked below will help you organise an online educational meet-up on Microsoft Teams with participants internal and/or external to the university. It may be useful to you if:

• your community wants to meet sometimes in a way that minimises costs, time and travel emissions;
• you’d like some speed meeting – perhaps participants want to match-make for a specific project or purpose and you want to make sure that when they eventually do meet in person it’s not from a standing start and they can extract the maximum benefit from that meeting.
• you want give participants a chance to chat with people they haven’t met before (easy in person – possible but often neglected online);
• you want to give your participants the free range to gather in groups by interest and move themselves into new breakout rooms whenever they want.

These kinds of meetings are possible on Microsoft Teams and some other web meeting platforms. With planning and a practice run for facilitation, ours went very smoothly indeed.

Here is a guide for anyone who would like to organise a meeting like this, incorporating our own example of the meetup for UK Education for Sustainability leaders in November 2025. Feel free to contact me (Mira Vogel) if you’d like to chat about it.

Thanks to King’s Academy, King’s Digital and LSE Eden Centre colleagues for getting involved with testing the meeting sessions and breakout room facilitation.