#11 - Create a teaching-team online collaboration space
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Teaching is increasingly complex, with contributions from many people in many formats to plan and bring together in a managed way.
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Teaching teams are growing in size and diversity, often including people from multiple departments or from outside of the university.
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Time is precious - we have enough meetings as it is, so why not make the most of our online collaboration space to save time and reduce meetings.
Enhancement goals addressed: Teaching quality | Interdisciplinarity
Tools and how to get support: Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams notifications
Solution overview
Microsoft Teams is the ideal platform for planning and managing a module. You can create your own team, and add any members of the university, as well as external participants. If appropriate, add student representatives. Set up channels within your Teams space for each area of work (e.g. planning, managing, evaluating). By default channels have messaging, files space, collaborative document editing (Microsoft Office), videoconferencing and many other features that can easily be added. You can use this to more effectively integrate professional support services (Library, IT, Careers), seminar tutors, teachers from other disciplines, etc.
Process
- Check to see if you already have Teams installed on your computer. If not, the simplest way to get it is to open Outlook web mail in your web browser, and look for Teams in the App Launcher (top left of the page). Follow the instructions. You can also use Teams in Apple, Android and Microsoft mobile devices.
- Create a new team for your teaching-team, and add your colleague as members - you can add any member of the university, including students, as well as people from outside (for example, external examiners).
- You can start conversations with team members (type @ in the message box to choose to notify individuals or the whole team). Instant notifications are sent to the people you mention in conversations using this mechanism.
- You can upload/create and work together on Office files.
- Create a shared One Note notebook, Planner plans to keep track of tasks, and use the many other add in apps.
- Try out the built-in video conferencing tools to have shorter, just-in-time meetings with colleagues. You can use this to show presentations, share screens and work together on documents.