MS Teams for teaching guide

• Channels in Teams provide students with a space to plan and co-ordinate group and project work.
• Students cannot create their own Teams, but can actively participate in Teams of which they are a member.
• Students can use chat, video and voice call functionality with other students. This means that they can quickly create study groups, collaboration groups and social groups.

If you are using Teams to foster term-long group work for assessment, you will need to provide structure and support as students may be in multiple time zones and have different commitments.

• Be very clear about the task, outputs and roles required.
• Give students time to work together to establish their ground rules for how they will work together.​
• If students are struggling with assigning the roles required, you could encourage them to assign roles randomly (e.g. based on where their names falls in the alphabet).
• Build in check-ins for individuals and the teams to raise any issues with the group dynamic and the task.
  • You could meet the teams online and use a short survey to get feedback from individuals on the progress of the team task. Be prepared to intervene if problems arise and help the group to manage the conflict.

The Assessment Toolkit has advice on considerations for group work.

• Students working in project or seminar channels can share and collaborate on files. Teams makes it easy to share files and work on them together. If working in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, members of the Team will be able to view, edit, and collaborate on them, right within Teams. Collaborating on files guidance
• Students can use @ mentions feature to get someone’s attention or to notify the entire channel about an update or to get advice on a question that they have.
• Microsoft Planner allows students to schedule and assign tasks to each other to help manage the progress of the project.
• Students working in project groups can schedule instant meetings to come together to discuss and collaborate on projects. If the channel is private, students will have access to the Meet option on the top of the channel to facilitate instant meetings.
• Students can create their own chat and collaboration groups by searching for and adding users to a video or text chat.

• Evans, R. (n.d.) Guidance for Group Work. [online] Available from: https://www.city.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/440238/Guidance-for-Group-Work.pdf (Accessed:10.08.2020)
• Washington University in St Louis Center for Teaching and Learning (2020) Using Roles in Group Work [online] Available from: https://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/resources/teaching-methods/group-work-in-class/using-roles-in-group-work/ (Accessed: 10.08.2020)