 Hello everyone, I'm Elisabetta from City University, Ray was meant to be here but unfortunately she's not well so she's only got me. Very interesting talk presentation by Sunday I think some things I'm going to be linking in there as well but basically what I'm talking to you today about is a little project we've got going at City which is an evaluation of using team spaces and that we kind of started using over lockdown just to start us off how many here are using team spaces or have used the team spaces? Most of you most have had experience who hasn't had experience of team spaces? I think okay so here you have not used team spaces right so interesting so most of you have an idea of what a team space looks like so basically what we decided to do at City was for each moodle module you could have a team space allocated to it that could be activated by the module leader so this was an option and it was the idea of having a team space where students could go in there and you know create a community of learning and interact with each other and chat and post stuff and share whereas moodle will be your institutional assessment you know boring bit whereas teams will be the exciting let's all get very creative and collaborate bit. It wasn't taken up by a lot of academics but a few did some run with it and we decided to carry out a little evaluation and asked those academics that had used team spaces how they caught on and we also invited some students to come and talk to us as well. Didn't get a lot we got 10 academic lecturers and 12 students however we did quite a sort of intense interviewing process and we took all their answers and put them on spreadsheets and got themes out of it so I think we we we managed to get some interesting information from them it's still not finished but hopefully we'll be finished soon we're in the sort of final draft but just to show you the process if we go to the the board so what we did was um okay this is a mirror board by the way if we um we went through our spreadsheet we found the themes and then we did the brainstorming thing where we chucked everything on the board as you can see it's all a bit of messy working out and things but we managed to break it down into about nine different themes and what I'm doing today is I just talked to you about what we found out what students were saying we've got a lot of information there but it's a lot um but um so I haven't put any of the staff comments in but just looking at some of the areas that students themselves have focused on so the first area I think if we go to our little red sheet is um trying to remember what it is already scheduled yeah oh thank you there were a bit stuck there yes okay good so if we go to the first one the top right one there scroll into that so the first area we had here was around learning design and looking at um students some sorry at staff digital skills so if we sort of yeah it's a lot of information that if we and if we can get any bigger there we had some positive I'll just read them out to you but we had some positive things about that so for example one student said I could share this after as well if you want to look at this but what works well is when a module leader is very experienced and is using teams and is very organized so saying some sort of basic things there and also in terms of what works well so if we can make this any bigger in terms of um teams was offering quite a lot of personalization so one student saying I'm struggling to understand something she was like um try call me and I'll uh on teams and so the students sort of literally call their their um uh lecturing the lecturer would answer them not something that would be encouraged but it was the idea that the students felt supported and that there was always a presence there on teams if they needed to ask um you know to to ask any questions um so good things about teams here was the idea of a well planned um team space as well as having access to support um through their lecturers however in terms of thinking about negative uh or critical things about some students digital skills sorry staff digital skills then again it's quite um yeah sorry a bit um some of the things they were suggesting were obviously the technical skills like a lecturer who wasn't using their camera well enough to focus um when working out a math solution for example or um or the way that a lecturer was the way that lecturer was teaching was all over the place and things weren't in um going in a natural sequence a bit like here and um um but one that was very interesting was that tutors weren't according to this student tutors weren't aware of the potential that teams had to get students to work together to collaborate together possibly by um you know amending and editing a document um and sort of working on it as a as a as a group um and just the lack of experience of using teams that was also picked on by students themselves just users not having not as much experience we would get stuck where we'd be looking at the PowerPoint but instead we'd be looking at our faces and then everybody just kind of turns off their cameras so it's the idea of you know staff having those skills to use TeamSpace well students picked up um if there was uh if you know if they felt that it needed more work on basically if we go down to the next um point that students picked up on a lot we surround student groups um student groups and collaboration I mean that's what TeamSpace is all about and so we had some very positive things about that so again if we can um I don't know if we can make that a bit bigger but some things like interacting in channels so on a TeamSpace you have a series of channels um one student saying it's easy to work collaboratively um it's it's we you know we're doing a module where we go in groups and we meet in these channels and then we share everything and then we can go back and see what we've shared and it's all that flexibility that they really appreciated and also the fact there's no kind of um hierarchy to it as well there's not someone who holds to master copy we all have free access to all the resources so everybody feels they're equal there's no kind of master holder making it like they get sense and noodle and other positive things about the um the uh well a negative thing of course is the usual which I'm sure many of us have heard particularly with online uh teaching and learning is the camera off and on the engagement we've got some quite sad uh feedback from here from students um so obviously a lot of uh the lecturers themselves were saying how they found it very frustrating that people turned off their cameras or were not engaging but here we have some students who are saying when you're in a breakout room and you say hi and no one answers back you just end up doing all your work by yourself or um this other one which is very sad here uh it was very cold in the beginning so it's that sense of coldness and and complete some detachment from the rest of their learning community um so that was a big thing as as we thought it would be but then if we go on to working in groups some six students commented that they found teams very helpful for that it helped them in terms of organization and organizing their own groups together so they really like that and here one's mentioning how one particular lecturer was really good at using the groups she would create groups and then she would get the groups to work on something and then get more back in together and every group shared what they did and and it was you know really good use of the sort of functionality of teams to do that so very much appreciated by the student there but if we go down more sorry um this is another one again very small but but where do students really interact is something that came up and WhatsApp's been mentioned a few times um so here we have six students that commented we didn't ask them about WhatsApp this is what they came up with and the lecturers themselves talked a lot about WhatsApp as well but here we have um WhatsApp I think that's everyone's go to but we also had the negative side of WhatsApp here quite a again another slight sad comment um if you're not in a WhatsApp group because I joined Kwan quite late not realizing they existed so it can be isolating in the sense that you don't actually know that all these things are going on around you so that's the sense of uh quite an important message there and here we have a bit more of a sinister one here saying I think for our year a lot of people have conducted uh colluding just in WhatsApp and they think they're not going to get caught with it so that's obviously one thing that um that that was said by students themselves however not all students felt like that we've got this one student who was a law student who says meeting up with my peers teams is much more professional and she was thinking about her own um kind of digital safety if you will I don't want to give my numbers to some people and so like I did more in term doing group work I use teams rather than WhatsApp so she was very sensible I think this person hit um and um so but is it so the last comment I think from this point is if we go on the blue sticker here is do students know what they can do on teams so in fact one student is here saying if we could set up our own private team groups when no one can come and see what we're doing in bed then we could use that instead but you can but no one had told them they could so that's a recommendation that we would like to put forward um but again another one here in fact underneath I um my colleagues and I used to maybe have chats there and do actual private team calls so some of them did I don't know if they found it by accident or it's because the academic told them their lecturers told them to that that's a good way of doing that um then we go on to the next point next couple of points which were about extra tools so what tools were used by both teachers and students um in teams what things did they use or what did they prefer to use and there's some interesting things so some students really um wanted more of a calendar integration uh they found it very easy to use teams on the calendar and they knew where they were or what they wanted to do um a few I think about three said that teams is much better than Moodle much better because they could do all this collaboration and it's so much more flexible and the recordings and they could find what they needed and they felt more in control more integration obviously between teams than Moodle um the flexibility the fact that you record things that you can put um links on the chat you can put in links to wherever you want in which you may have missed um so everybody found that pretty good and then the final one which is very tiny here don't get it big it's not zoom um a lot of again we didn't say tell us about zoom we're just talking about teams but a lot of comparison with zoom um again some saying you know zoom's great for some things um or this one saying I've seen my sister use zoom and it's horrible or this one zoom it's more difficult to find their recordings so what they liked about teams is you're in a team channel you have a meeting there's a recording and you could um people putting links or the lecturers putting links and resources into the chat you can relax watch it whereas if you're on zoom you have to take everything down before the end of the zoom meeting because everything is going to disappear so that was um something about you know the the files the resources that are shared they're always going to be accessible I can always access them rather um so that was a a good retrieval of resources was a winning point for teams so for sure um so couple minutes oh right okay um technical limitations while usual internet crashing particularly when using specialist software very frustrating um and uh screen sharing and time lag so those are kind of the limitations come up and yeah that's it I think a couple of minutes I'll just stop there then and uh uh any questions recommendation we have some recommendations the idea was but I don't think I'm going to get big enough was to give you all one recommendation each in your table and think about and well we could try and do that maybe yeah um see how big can we make them so these are some of the draft recommendations so they're not complete and just wondering if you could maybe take one on each table and just think about that but uh yeah I think we don't have much in terms uh time to do that but recommendation one uh looking at the comments um lecturers also made comments about WhatsApp obviously so it was a quite a big uh part of the um response useful to support and encourage students to collaborate on team sites and support them in thinking about creating their own study learning groups on teams rather than on what's that difficult one that one but what can we do to do how can we support that um recommendation two get the positive feedback from the students about how they enjoy coming into teams in groups to learn and that came through and shared that along with the with the sort of academic um staff three uh guidance this was an issue with teams meeting and team spaces it was a bit of confusion what the difference between the two but have the team meetings in the spaces so that the students are ready in that space and are ready to sort of work there um for create guidance for students how to set up their own private groups um another uh five was um create more training guidance on how to fully exploit all the potential sort of uh potentials uh of the team spaces themselves and saying some of the students pointing out that their lecturers maybe didn't quite know what they could do in that space and six to push for more of a development to build up of a community of practice for the lecturers themselves to build up their practice in using team spaces for teaching and learning so yeah that's it thank you one quick question if i've got a quick question we'll share the mirror so you can have as a picture of the course any questions maybe in zoom yeah any in zoom sorry i i just want that zoom any questions in zoom uh yeah one one question uh for regard of what level of planning guidance and moderation were provided by academics who were more successful uses of team classes spaces what sorry i missed the first bit what level of planning guidance and moderation were provided by academics who were more successful uses of team class so right because we mainly started um over lockdown it was everything else in emergency mode but we've got a teams we've got a couple of communities on our team space for um staff themselves we've got a teams uh the technical sort of team space so if you had any problems with the technical side of things you could ask them there we also got a learning and teaching team space that's more around the pedagogy of um of teaching online and where we would also have these kind of like lunches every Thursday which were non-line informal session where you come and share what you're doing or or um see other what others are doing um that wasn't very well as usual these things kind of happen in a little bit of a corner however much you try and sort of you know disseminate the idea that this is there and this is available and obviously with uh staff as we know very time for and they have so much to juggle quite difficult for them to um you know sometimes find their way to these things so but we we tried doing these team community sites mainly to begin with and guidance the the guidance we have in our on our guidance sites