Abstract
The sudden shift to online teaching and learning brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to consider alternatives to entrenched teaching practices. Making use of the private channel function in Microsoft Teams, I replaced traditional sections in an introductory linguistics course with asynchronous groupwork. This enabled students to form learning communities that facilitated peer learning and support in spite of remote learning, while unexpectedly connecting students with instructors in more personalized ways than typically witnessed in traditional sections. The medium allowed the teaching team to provide tailored feedback on each group’s work, as well as point out errors that were common across groups. I reflect on some of the problems encountered and consider how these might be addressed in the future.
Highlights
Discussion sections are commonplace in large university courses, and for good reasons: can they provide opportunities for active learning that supplement traditional lectures (e.g. Buckley et al 2007), they serve as useful platforms for novice instructors to develop their practice (Thomson & Zamboanga 2008)
I report on a teaching intervention that was implemented in an undergraduate introductory linguistics course taught at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where I replaced traditional sections with groupwork operationalized through Microsoft Teams
Besides meeting weekly in their private channels to discuss the problem sets, some gangs initiated meetings to revise for midterm tests, demonstrating that they viewed their gang as a learning community whose utility was not limited to working on the problem sets
Summary
Discussion sections are commonplace in large university courses, and for good reasons: can they provide opportunities for active learning that supplement traditional lectures (e.g. Buckley et al 2007), they serve as useful platforms for novice instructors to develop their practice (Thomson & Zamboanga 2008). Replacing traditional sections with Teams-based groupwork: Remote learning and beyond Leslie Lee*
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