Microsoft Teams for Teaching and Learning Pilot

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is an online collaboration platform. It enables group members to co-author documents, have both individual and group chats, schedule meetings, as well as use audio or video communication features. Teams is currently available to UQ staff for organisational unit, project-based work and professional group collaborations. ITS is planning to make Teams available to all UQ students by Semester 1, 2021.

For more information, please refer to the Welcome to Microsoft Teams (Microsoft) guide.

How was the pilot initiated?

The pilot was requested by the ITaLI Deputy Director, Digital Learning and endorsed by the Digital Learning Sub-committee.

What is the objective of the pilot?

Overview

The Microsoft Teams Teaching and Learning pilot will investigate the use of Teams to facilitate teaching and learning in UQ courses. The initial focus will be based on the most promising use cases identified through consultation. Consultation was done at a faculty level and with members for the Learning Design Community, eLearning Operational Forum and Digital Learning Sub-committee.

1. Course level collaboration / discussion (i.e. replacing discussion boards/Facebook)
2. Tutorial group facilitation
3. Group assignments / projects (i.e. setting up a private channel per team with assignment requirements that include the use of Teams to document meeting minutes, task allocation etc).

Tools to cover these uses cases has been a long term functionality gap in UQ's eLearning environment.

In Summer Semester, 2020 students will participate in a course Team set up by their course coordinator as 'guests'. In Semester 1, 2021 after Teams has been made available to all UQ students, they will participate in a course Team set up by their course coordinator as 'members'.

Detailed pilot objectives

Summer Semester 2020 and Semester 1 2021

1. Evaluate the effectiveness of Teams as a collaboration tool to faciliate course level discussions, tutorial active learning activities and small project group teamwork.
2. Collect feedback from learning designers, course coordinators and students to inform 'best practice' guidance on using Teams for teaching and learning at UQ.
3. Produce teaching, learning and technical resources to support the adoption of Teams for teaching and learning.
4. Produce exemplars to model best practice when incorporating the use of Teams in courses.

Semester 2 2021

1. Incorporate staff support for Teams for Teaching and Learning into the eLearning Systems and Support team, technical (help@learn.uq.edu.au) and Professional Development services.
2. Through faculty consultation, determine additional use cases and apps to pilot.

What is happening?

Summer Semester 2020

In the first stage of the pilot, Teams will be piloted by three courses in Summer Semester, with support provided by the eLearning team, ITaLI learning designers and AskUs. A request for volunteers to be involved in the pilot was publicised in the eLearning newsletter during Semester 2, 2020.

Semester 1 2021

In the second stage of the pilot, Teams will be piloted by fifteen courses in Semester 1 with support provided by the eLearning team, ITaLI/faculty/school learning designers. A request for volunteers to be involved in the pilot was publicised in the eLearning newsletter during Semester 2, 2020 and also through faculty-based communications.

What resources are available to support the pilot?

Available

• Microsoft Teams tool page

Planned

• Teams for Teaching and Learning (face-to-face, via Zoom) through UQ Staff Development
• Teams for Teaching and Learning online workshop

Summer Pilot project team