Abstract
Microsoft Teams is a new collaborative working and digital community platform launched in 2017 as part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite of applications. It provides an online space ideally suited for collaboration and streamlining communication for anyone involved in online learning and teaching in Higher Education. In the Distance Learning Unit (DLU) at Leeds Beckett University, Teams has been piloted used as part of a University-wide pilot project to help transform the way we work with both staff and students, both on distance and classroom courses. This presentation will outline the wider context of the Teams pilot in the University and how it is being trialled as a potential replacement for other collaborative platforms. As an early adopter, the Distance Learning Unit has experimented with Teams to improve communication, collaborative working, and sharing of best practice within the team. The presentation will then focus on how these lessons have been applied in working with the Course Team and students on a fully online distance learning course to help boost student engagement, develop a more active learner community, facilitate collaborative working, enhance resource sharing and provide a more accessible, mobile learning experience. The presentation will look at both the challenges and benefits of moving collaboration and communication outside the VLE and present staff and student feedback on their experiences of using Teams instead of other more traditional VLE-based tools and the provision of a safe, collaborative space.
Highlights
Based in the north of England, Leeds Beckett University (LBU) has over 24,000 students, most of whom are undergraduates taught on campus
In the Distance Learning Unit (DLU) at Leeds Beckett University, Teams has been piloted used as part of a University-wide pilot project to help transform the way we work with both staff and students, both on distance and classroom courses
Hazard a suggestion that different institutional strategies are needed to ensure the adoption of a ‘tool’ such as MS Teams by assessing how MS Teams can be calibrated against the above
Summary
Based in the north of England, Leeds Beckett University (LBU) has over 24,000 students, most of whom are undergraduates taught on campus. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in principle not relevant to an education strategy, has implications for how the university deals with student records, and the student relationship. Regulatory initiatives such as the Teaching Excellence Framework generate their data requirements, measuring existing realities or creating new categories for measurement. This environment is not unique to LBU but suggests that the tools and affordances of learning technologies occupy just one corner of a digital and material ecosystem of projects, programs, platforms, and devices, which compete for students and academics’ time and attention, and scarce organisational. On a spectrum from users to managers, are different groups, with their own professional cultures, specialist languages, and working practices
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