Collaboration

As the Unit Chair of the Business Management Capstone unit, A/Prof. Bardo Fraunholz had at least a quarter of his cohort as cloud campus students, and therefore the traditional classroom set up didn’t work. As a capstone unit, he needed an environment where students could immerse themselves in the content, interact with their peers and connect with real clients external to Deakin. He sought a solution within the University, including the LMS and other third-party tools, but these did not suit the needs of the unit, so he began to explore Microsoft Teams.

To hear more about how A/Prof. Bardo Fraunholz implemented it into his teaching, listen to the podcast on the Teaching with Microsoft Teams page.

The school of IT tripled from 1500 students to 4300 students in four years and is the biggest school in the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environments. Their focus is on Capstone units with students from different disciplines to work on an industry-based project in their final year. With such growth, they had an opportunity to conduct a major revision of the curriculum focusing on how they could enhance the student experience.

As part of this revision, they wanted to address the gap of communication and collaboration between students and between teaching staff (supervisors) and students. In order to apply an industry standard, agile approach, they had to think creatively and consider a whole range of tools and platforms to solve issues around communication and collaboration. They decided on Microsoft Teams as it is a tool that is used extensively in the workplace; and they were able to take advantage of Deakin SSO and active directory, so students were able to use the MS Teams app, Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
Other reasons for selecting Microsoft Teams as the collaboration hub for staff and students also included the following:

• Students could easily communicate with each other.
• Microsoft Teams was accessible from any device and students could do everything in one place.
• Supervisors could contribute and help students where necessary.
• Microsoft Teams is supported by Deakin, so they didn’t have to worry about any technical issues or pricing due to an enterprise wide license.

By implementing Microsoft Teams they have seen an increase in engagement and enhanced communication and collaboration within teams.

A Deakin University student, Rahul undertook a Capstone unit that used MS Teams as a collaboration hub for his project. In previous units, where collaboration was involved, the software used was determined by the group; and what he found was that there would be multiple software applications used for different purposes. That is, the group would choose software for conversation such as WhatsApp; and Google Drive for sharing files and creating artefacts; but then there were multiple applications for collaborating, and it was hard to keep track of what was happening. Microsoft Teams provided a positive student experience at it enabled collaboration in the one place so there is less need to go outside to use other applications.

To hear more about how Rahul’s student experience using Microsoft Teams, listen to A Student’s Perspective of Microsoft Teams podcast.