Microsoft Teams for Teaching and Learning Pilot & Early Adopters program

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 at a date to be confirmed. The delay of the migration of student Microsoft 365 accounts planned for January - February 2022 has also delayed making Teams available to students.

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

Early Adopters Program Semester 1 2024

The early adopters program will be continued in Semester 1 2024 to support staff using Teams for Teaching and Learning. As students will be added as guests to a staff team, only core functionality will be available to them. i.e. students will not be able to add apps to channels.

Support will include a consultation with a learning designer for advice on planning Teams based learning activities and a consultation with an eLearning Adviser for support on setting up and managing your Team.

How was the 2020 -2024 pilot initiated?

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

What was the objective of the 2020 - 2024 pilot?

Overview

The Microsoft Teams Teaching and Learning pilot investigated the use of Teams to facilitate teaching and learning in UQ courses. The initial focus was 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. Due to staff and students not being in a joint Teams tenancy the pilot and early adopters program were delivered by enrolling students as 'guests' in a staff Team.

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.
5. Teams is not suitable for adoption in large courses due to the large amount of manual processing while integration is not avaialble.

Teams available to all students

Once Teams is available to all students additional smaller pilots will be run.

1. Incorporate staff support for Teams for Teaching and Learning into the eLearning Systems and Support team, technical (help@elearning.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 was 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 was 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.

Semester 2 2021

Due to the delay in the joining of the staff and student Teams tenancies an early adopters program was delivered to onboard courses from additional schools in Teams.

Semester 1 and 2 2022

Due to the delay with the joining of the staff and student Teams tenancies the deployment of Teams to additional courses has been paused. Teams is not suitable for adoption in large courses due to the large amount of manual processing while integration is not avaialble.

Semester 1 2023

Due to the delay in the joining of the staff and student Teams tenancies an early adopters program was delivered to onboard courses from additional schools in Teams.

Semester 2 2023 

Due to the delay in the joining of the staff and student Teams tenancies an early adopters program was delivered to onboard courses that used Teams in Semester 2 2022. 

Semester 1 2024

Twenty-three courses use Teams for teaching and learning in Semester 1 2024.

Semester 2 2024

Teams will be accessible for all courses during Semester 2, 2024. A link will be incorporated into the Learn.UQ course template. Course Coordinators will decide whether their courses should utilize Teams and will then activate the link. Students enrolled in the respective courses will automatically be added to the corresponding Teams.

Workshops are scheduled to take place from June to July. Updated instructional guides for both staff and students will be made available accordingly.

What resources are available to support the pilot?

Available

• Staff Microsoft Teams guide
• Student Microsoft Teams guide

Summer Semester 2020 Pilot project team

Semester 1 2021 Pilot project team