3 key ways Microsoft Teams enriches higher education teaching and learning

Whether remotely, in class or hybrid , Microsoft Teams helps to simplify and structure higher education’s day-to-day digital environment – integrating seamlessly with all the solutions you’re already using.

“My teaching is now entirely based on Teams. The interaction with students and the teacher is a better level than traditional teaching” – Pasi Vahimaa, Professor, The University of Eastern Finland

Microsoft Teams has already proved itself to be an invaluable remote learning tool. Now, as students, lecturers, researchers and support staff become accustomed to the new, socially distanced normal of higher education, Teams is proving its value once more for hybrid learning . It significantly enriches collaboration in all educational scenarios, integrating seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions, and making it easy to work with Education Partners.

Take a look at the ‘how to’ videos curated for you below. They show the different ways in which Teams simplifies everything by integrating with the entire family of Microsoft 365 apps, and more. It’s designed to work perfectly with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Forms and Stream, as well as a range of third-party apps popular in education.

“When the lockdown hit us, our day-to-day training activities changed dramatically. As we had already been relying heavily on Teams and SharePoint, we were able to continue working seamlessly” – Tobias M. Schifferle, Lecturer, PHZH

1. Helping everyone to work together

Teams is all about making it easier to work together to achieve shared goals. Which is why collaboration, both inside and outside the teaching space, is at the heart of everything it does.
So, when teaching remotely or in class, Teams makes it easy to share files with students. The same applies to colleagues. And if the shared files are in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, then those colleagues or students can view, edit and comment on them in the app.

For example, take a look at the collaborative advantages of creating Class and Staff Teams.

“With Microsoft Teams, I have a place where I can meet and collaborate with the course attendees – regardless of space and time” – Tobias M. Schifferle, Lecturer, PHZH

When you create a Staff Team, a Staff OneNote Notebook is also created. Your team can use its collaboration space for curriculum writing, meeting notes and sharing resources. The private spaces for each staff member are ideal for professional development plans, class observation notes and lesson feedback. There’s even a content library for sharing read-only information.

In addition, you can start a PLC (Professional Learning Community) Team. This is ideal for smaller faculty and administrator groups who want to examine an educational trend or initiate any other pedagogical study.

2. Making it much easier to teach and learn

With many lectures remaining remote or hybrid, the need for interactive and engaging learning experiences is even more important. Microsoft Teams is the perfect platform for this, offering a wealth of multi-modal settings that allow essential personal interaction, bringing together content, video, annotation, live exchange, breakout rooms and much more. Watch Dr. David Kellerman, Lecturer at the University of South Wales School of Engineering, explain how he creates an engaging online experience for his students.

SharePoint is particularly popular with lecturers because it’s great at keeping content alive, relevant and accessible. Here you can see how Dr. Kellerman takes just five minutes to create a simple SharePoint page to pin as a tab in Teams. It’s an ideal way to collect and curate live content in familiar webpage layout – showing the topics covered, tasks for students, key notes, videos, and any other content you think could be useful.

“Teams is an excellent tool to combine all forms of material in the same platform to form a complete picture of the learning process without gathering information manually from different sources” – Pasi Vahimaa, Professor, The University of Eastern Finland

You can also create virtual quizzes in Microsoft Forms. Assessing student knowledge used to generate piles of test papers. But with Forms it’s easy to create virtual quizzes and add them directly to a Teams assignment.

Any quiz created in Forms will be available in Teams for future use. You can also choose who you assign the quiz to – an entire class or specific students. They see the quiz as an assignment in Teams, and can complete it without leaving the Teams interface, ready to be graded in the Teams’ assignment tab or in Forms.

These days a lot of teaching is, by necessity, done via video. With Microsoft Stream you can create your own video channel: recording, storing and sharing your lessons or lectures using a pinned tab in Teams.

From the creation of an assignment to its end, and everything else in between – tracking, reviewing, amending and grading – Teams provides a single, comprehensive stage on which to engage, inform and guide students.

And because everything is stored on a digital hub, students can no longer lose their assignments, while lecturers will be free from the burden of hard copy. Again, this is a major consideration for educators who now have to consider the sanitisation issues arising from sharing real-world items.

3. Integrating seamlessly with the way you work

Whether with Microsoft apps or your favourite Learning Management System apps – like Moodle, Canvas and Blackboard – Teams offers a totally inclusive, customizable way to work.

You can personalise Teams by adding the tools and resources you regularly use, like Documents, PowerPoint and Excel. You can add third party apps too. For example, see how Polly – a great app for getting informal feedback from students – has been added here.

“Thanks to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, I always have my office where I need it – in the office, on the train, in a coffee shop or in lockdown” – Tobias M. Schifferle, Lecturer, PHZH

Furthermore, you’ll find that many Education Partners like Kano, Flipgrid, Wakelet and ThingLink feature the ‘Share to Teams’ button, making it easier for lecturers to jumpstart a conversation or create an assignment. That’s because Microsoft is always working with those partners to support educators in improving student growth and outcomes.

What’s the future for higher education?

We all knew the future of education was digital, but nobody could have foreseen the acceleration of that trend due to the practical necessities driven by COVID-19.

Microsoft Teams is clearly part of that future, as it provides the collaborative glue that holds the growing number of educationally relevant apps together – making them work more effectively as a single, cohesive whole that helps promote educational growth and outcomes.

“In our case, technology – and especially Teams – will improve the on-campus experience, delivering punctual hybrid learning experiences when students can’t attend. Teams will become the new LMS leader thanks to the integration of Office 365 and Azure tools, allowing us to evolve more student-centred learning”- CEU Universities