Meet the People Teaching with Microsoft Teams

With the transition to teaching online that has occurred in T1, there has been widescale use of Microsoft Teams in the teaching and learning. It has proven to be an effective tool to integrate into the digital space to facilitate team work and collaboration for students.

If you are considering the use of Microsoft Teams in your unit, there are many benefits and considerations for you before you implement it. Meet the people who have implemented it and what you can learn from them. This will be an open session where we encourage you to ask questions before and during the session.

Who will you meet?

A/Professor Bardo Fraunholz

As the Unit Chair of the Business Management Capstone unit, with at least a quarter of his cohort cloud campus students, the traditional classroom set up didn’t work. As a capstone unit, Bardo needed an environment where students could immerse themselves in the content, interact with their peers and connect with real clients external to Deakin. He sought a solution within the University, including the LMS and other third-party tools, but these did not suit the needs of the unit, so he began to explore Microsoft Teams.

Jesse McMeikan

The School of IT runs a large scale Industry Capstone Program spanning four core units across all disciplines within the School. Students are grouped into agile multidisciplinary teams and work on a final year industry-based project that is continuously improved and expanded on over multiple years . Jesse was part of a team that undertook a major course revision in 2019 to focus on how they could enhance the student experience through industry relevant task design; improving communication and professional skills, and increasing collaboration within the School to scale delivery up to 1000 concurrent students each trimester. They trialed different tools but there were challenges with each, until they adopted Microsoft Teams, which helped to manage such a large cohort due to its integration of Deakin Single Sign On and its vast array of features and integrations which support agile project delivery.

Dr Elicia Lanham

As a Senior Lecturer in Information Technology, Dr Elicia Lanham has implemented Microsoft Teams in a large first-year unit in response to COVID-19 and will share her experiences about how it has impacted the learning experience from a teacher and a learner perspective. She has also implemented the use of MS Teams "Live Event" function to delivery Class materials across campuses and will share what she has learnt from this endeavour.