If you consider how students currently engage with collaborative learning tasks/projects, they are often left to decide what software they use and how they use it. This leads to students using multiple software for multiple purposes and can lead to systems fatigue. Microsoft Teams eliminates this as all the collaboration happens in one space; from conversation/discussion; to artefact generation; to meetings; and planning of tasks. Rather than communicating via email, you can tag people and get a direct reply in a familiar manner.

Students and academics can also personalise their space by adding tabs and apps that they want to use. Take it another step further and all of your content can be hosted within Microsoft Teams so students don’t need to go outside of Microsoft Teams.

Central to Microsoft Teams is transparency and the ability for students to evidence their contribution to a project. They can do this by sharing their contribution through conversation and artefact generation.

Through ‘Manage team > Analytics’ as a facilitator you can also see how many ‘active users’ there are; as well as when and how many messages there are.

Through interviews with academics and researching the use of Microsoft Teams in teaching and learning, the following should be considered when developing collaborative learning tasks with Microsoft Teams:

• Develop a project that spans an appropriate amount of time across the trimester to promote active engagements;
• Be explicit on the purpose of Microsoft Teams for staff and students;
• Consider the set up of the Microsoft Team as it can be hard to facilitate and manage multiple teams from an academic perspective;
• Develop tasks that are authentic to their industry context so the use of Microsoft Teams is reflective of professional practice;
• Scaffold the collaborative learning task so there are key milestones for students to evidence;
• Provide support resources for students such as the Good practice guide for using Microsoft Teams

 

Collaboration in Microsoft Teams – Explore how Microsoft Teams can be used as a collaboration hub in Higher Education and how it can enhance collaborative learning

Watch this overview of Microsoft Teams to review the basic, and most common features of Microsoft Teams.

Complete this Microsoft Teams interactive demo to explore the basic functionality.

Know the basics but want to know more about the activity feed and notifications? Use this section to explore the Microsoft Teams canvas a little more.

• Explore your activity feed – to find a summary of everything that’s happened in the Teams you are a part of will appear in this feed. Find out what all the different symbols mean.
• Overview of notifications – the six things you need to know about managing notifications in your Teams.
• Personalise your notifications – check your settings for your notifications and personalise your space.
• Pin a Team or Channel – want to prioritise your workspace; use this to pin a team or channel.
• Use the search function – can’t find an old message, or chat? Use the search function to find them.
• Tips and tricks – six key things you need to know including tips on chat, formatting, and searching and hiding messages.

Whether you want to send a message to a channel or create an announcement, this set of resources will walk you through it.

• Create and format a post – want to get started by posting a message in the channel but need to know more about formatting?
• Create an announcement – sometimes you need a message to stand out; with a headline and an image.
• Send a message to a channel – this will show how to send a message to a channel in teams.
• Post to multiple channels – if you need to share an announcement across multiple teams, rather than post in individual channels, you can post the same message to multiple teams and channels.
• One-on-one and team chat – get started with one on one or group chat.
• Private chat with one person – how to start chats and make audio calls.
• Make some files ‘Read-only’ – use this when you would like students to have ‘read-only’ access to files.

The City of Westminister College uses technology to ensure students have the necessary skills to succeed in future jobs. They implemented Microsoft Teams to make it seamless for students to collaborate on projects; to communicate with peers easier and connect with the teacher and have a conversation in real-time.

Watch eLearning Manager, Esam Baboukhan explain how Microsoft Teams has made his classroom more inclusive and enabled all of his students to connect.

Dr Timothy Ponce is a Professor of English where some of his students were struggling with their coursework and didn’t reach out to him or their peers for help. Although there were multiple communication channels available, he wanted to reduce the number of tools that the students were accessing so he introduced Microsoft Teams.

Watch him explain what he did and the impact it had on his students here.