Ms Teams
I became aware that MS Teams was adopted in our institution during spring 2020 (when Lockdown started in the UK) to facilitate online video calls and course content delivery, which was much needed to reduce the spread of the COVID 19 virus.
Although
there are a number of other video conferencing platforms such as Zoom or Googlemeet or Gotomeetings, our institution, which uses mainly Microsoft Office
products decided to include MS Teams. The benefit of using the whole MS Office
Suite means that MS Teams is smoothly integrated with Microsoft Outlook to set
up and schedule meetings.
It was in
Summer 2021 I started supervising postgraduate students, so meeting them
online rather than face-to-face has been the norm for me since.
In this
respect, MS Teams is very instrumental as an online space to learn and
collaborate. Apart from face-to-face video connectivity, we are also able to
share screens, use the chat function and record the meeting. Many lectures
or tutorials were held over teams during the time of the Covid 19 pandemic and
some courses have never returned fully to in-person meetings. In the last two
years, I had the pleasure of holding both – online seminars for e.g., research
skills in adult nursing as well as my postgraduate supervision and in-person
seminars and lectures for BA Digital Games Design or for MSc Public Health.
I would
like to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of holding seminars online
or in person.
The
advantages of holding a seminar online are that it is safe or at least safe
from health viruses, it is accessible for many students or participants from
different parts in the world (and with different levels of accessibility
needs), it can be recorded and therefore viewed at a later date. The recording
in itself can be a 'scaffolding' (Gonulal & Loewen 2018, Vygotsky & Cole 1978) for students as they can
review the material at their own learning pace. The chat function can be used for
questions or commentaries or to include supporting materials. The latter is
particularly useful for collaboration, and the creation of break-out rooms for
smaller study groups is beneficial for collaboration. In my view, much learning
is a socially situated and constructed process (Vygotsky 1986) and can be
supported in particular by these online tools in MS teams such as break-out rooms,
chat, status display and reactions.
The
disadvantages are that not all students keep their cameras on, which means the
educator does not necessarily get feedback through facial expressions, and it
is hard to keep an overview of all participants attending. Unless well-planned
it can be harder to get students to talk with each other, or to get them to
talk in the first place, particularly when the camera is switched off. It is
further difficult for the educator, i.e. me, to keep an eye on the chat while
presenting content and some questions may be missed. Having said this, if my
seminar had been large in student numbers, I would have asked a student to be
the ‘chat champion’, i.e. someone who monitors the chat activity regularly.
Fovet 2023 in his chapter on "When
being online hinders the act of challenging the banking model in pedagogy"
describes similar experiences in particular how online technology, although it could challenge traditional ways of teaching and learning such as the
banking model (Freire 2000), students did not embrace these forms of
interactions. The online space and the accompanying (novel) digital
functions could be used to learn collaboratively, but also to reflect and
critique, even asynchronously, yet students still expected to be fed content
readily prepared by the teacher. Fovet 2023 sees the reasons for this in the
neo-liberal context where we are used to consuming without challenging societal
norms.
The
background function in teams is an interesting function as it allows people to
express themselves and, thus their identity. The background choice could also
be used by me to set a tone for the learning environment such as this is a safe
space for learning (Holley &Steiner 2005, Wilson et al. 2015). I had a
beautiful picture of Lego people in rainbow colours, which was provided by the
LGBTQ+ staff network of the university, and I liked it as it conveyed
relatively subtly the message that I’m accepting of all identities. The picture below presents a similar one.
Many
students have their cameras switched off, but some when switching their camera
on, showed backgrounds of amazing landscapes or some personal photos. Others
remained with ‘unpersonal’ clean backgrounds of office environments or just
blurred the real background. The personalisation of the background brings me to
my position where I see digital technology becoming an extension to our
identities which is socially and culturally constructed and varies on the
context (Taricani 2007).
The advantages of in-person seminars in comparison to online meetings are that the educator can pick up on the more subtle cues of interpersonal communication, a sense of the group working, and group discussions can be more easily generated. Being present in the room allows the educator to use their whole body to communicate and educators can create a friendly atmosphere (Armellini & De Stefanie 2016) and pick up more easily on disruptive or unengaged students. The disadvantages are disruptions due to latecomers and an increased viral infection risk.
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