Using Microsoft Teams in teaching and learning activity

28 Sep 2020

Microsoft Teams is now available for all staff and students across the University. It provides a suite of collaboration tools that you may find useful in communicating with your students as part of teaching.

Though many of the functions are available in Blackboard / Zoom already (and Blackboard continues to be our primary VLE), you may find Teams a useful addition. The core functions of Teams include:

• Team document collaboration and management
• Team audio/visual meetings
• 1:1 or Group chat
• Team Channels that can be used to organise any of the above by group or subject

Over the coming months the Flexible Learning Programme will be reviewing these tools and providing guidance and recommendations on how they may be used. In the meantime, if you are comfortable using these additional tools or would like to experiment, we encourage you to do so. Your experiences and feedback will be vital to ensuring that we get the best use out of these products and helping us to establish and share best practice. We will be setting up a user community to facilitate this.

If you would like to request a Team for your teaching unit, please use this Microsoft Teams Request form.

Please note that for any tools beyond the core functions listed above, eLearning teams and IT Services will only be able to provide support on a “best endeavours” basis. The range of features and tools for which we can provide full support will grow over time. If you are experimenting with any advanced features, you should also make this clear to your students and be prepared to revert to fully-supported systems (e.g. Blackboard) if necessary.

You will find more details of Microsoft Teams and other useful information on the guidance for online teaching pages of the Institute of Teaching and Learning web pages. 

Ian Hutt

Head of Digital Learning