Recording my classes?

That restricts the choices a little. Most Windows laptops only accept a tiny, delicate, wispy, mono microphone signal plugged into the side of the machine. They do pretty well with those. The forum is full of people trying to plug stereo mixers, cassette machines, and home music systems into their Windows Laptops. Almost all fail.

You can go in as a USB digital signal, that works famously – from either a USB microphone or a multi-microphone mixer that can speak USB, or a full analog mixer and a simple USB sound card like the UCA 202 we reviewed here on the forum.

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/sound-card-reviews/8375/1

I need to think about where to go from here because multi-microphone setups are not straightforward and it’s easy to design a simple, cheap system that needs custom parts, or an expensive system that just plugs together.

We have several systems here that are exactly what you want, but I had to design and build some of the cable adapters. The jump from one microphone to two (or more) is an enormous leap.

Koz