Introduction and story behind the emergence of this learning activity. What was the need, what issue/problem was the teacher facing and wanted to resolve? 

Within this course, students normally design and perform a research experiment within a group with live guidance of a supervisor. Since we could not meet-up on campus we faced a few challenges like how to keep in touch with your group members as a student and as a supervisor. How to facilitate contact between the groups? Normally this evolves naturally with live contact and now needed to be organised and facilitated. 

We modified this learning activity, by asking the students to perform an experiment at home. In order to improve communication and student engagement, we decided to experiment with using MS Teams since we as teachers already had positive experiences with using the tool amongst ourselves. 

• MS Teams 
  • Public channels – information sharing 
  • Private group channel – smaller discussions 
  • Conference calling – for arranging group work, discussions 
  • Document sharing – writing a report together within the group, providing feedback 
• MS Stream app on MS Teams – for sharing and uploading videos

What has been learned after this lesson/activity has been executed ?

n/a

Specific description and demonstration of the lesson idea/learning activity.

We created two public channels within MS Teams for sharing official information to all students. The ‘announcement’ and ‘interview’ channel. This information was also available on Brightspace.

Figure 1: Example of communication within the ‘interview channel’

Mentions tips lecturer has for colleagues based on their experience.

What was good about this learning activity 

• Improved communication 
• It helped to build an online community and provided support to students 
• Students perceived it as fun learning and a good tool for interacting and communicating with each other 
• It is an excellent tool for group work 
• With MS teams you can create attractive content 
• We will keep on using MS Teams for sharing between groups even if we can go back to an on-campus setting 

Lessons learned 

• It is not a replacement for Brightspace but can be used for additional support. 
• You need to have clear communication guidelines for the channels and also what is communicated through Brightspace and what through MS Teams. Setting up a communication plan beforehand helps to guide teachers and students on where to post information.  
• Take care not to overload your students with information 
• Structure of your MS Teams team is important. Think beforehand on what you want to do, and what would be the best way to implement this. 
• Orientate your students, also on the use of the tools. This can be done via small tasks and using polling to get an indication of how students experienced it. This can then guide the teacher on whether more guidelines are necessary. 
• Make your announcements stand out by using the formatting options in MS teams. 
• Break the ice by initiating the first contact.  
• Make a personal connection, e.g. share your own experiences, make posts or comments in the general channel. 
• Engage and make it fun. 

• Microsoft tutorials on how to set-up your MS Teams page: Microsoft Support
• Manuals for adding MS Teams within Brightspace:  Brightspace Help for Lecturers  
• Presentation on the use of MsTeams for student interaction: (video below)

• Demo of the use of MsTeams for student interaction: (video below)