Collaborate: Moving to ‘Read only’ in June 2025 and not available from July 2026

Collaborate is one of the University's video-conferencing tools for teaching. It will transition to 'read-only' access on 30 June 2025 and will no longer be available at the University from the morning of 31 July 2026.

This is part of our work to ensure that the University’s digital ecosystem is fit for purpose and meeting the needs of its users. In addition, Collaborate is no longer under active development and because of this, is not keeping pace with similar digital education tools.

What does this mean?

The changes to the provision of Collaborate means that:

• you’ll be able to watch content, but won’t be able to use Collaborate for live sessions from 30 June 2025 onwards
• the past three academic years (2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25) of Collaborate recordings will be available via Minerva until 31 July 2026
• staff will need to save any Collaborate recordings they wish to keep. Older recordings (2021/22 and older) will need to be saved by 31 July 2025, and those recordings from the 2022/23 academic year onwards saved by June 2026.
• staff who currently use Collaborate will need to move to Microsoft Teams for all future teaching sessions.

What do I need to do?

• Microsoft Teams is the University's virtual classroom platform and you will need to use this for your teaching from the 2025/26 academic year.  Guidance on using Microsoft Team for teaching is available to assist you with this move
• save any recordings that you want to keep that are older than the 2022/23 academic year. Please see our guide on How to download a recording from Collaborate and save it to Mediasite.

Support and guidance

We want to assure all staff that you will be supported in the use of Microsoft Teams as the alternative platform for your teaching.  Please contact your local Digital Education Enhancement (DEE) team if you need support or have queries during this transition period.