By Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University 

“MS® Teams” rolled out in 2017 as part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite of work tools, which is very commonly used in higher education (including Outlook email, the MS Office Suite of tools, Groups, and others).  Initially, Teams was mostly about distributed collaboration on shared projects.  However, of late, it has also been brought into play for teaching and learning, given the sudden shift to online learning in the initial COVID-19 period.  

At K-State, some faculty were early adopters of MS Teams for teaching and learning, with use cases for a few courses, a design studio course, and some others.  At a Faculty Senate meeting in May 2020, some faculty requested more information on how MS Teams could be used for teaching and learning.  

The tasking to the team included their assessment of the pros and cons of taking this on, some “use cases” for MS Teams in teaching and learning, and some Knowledge Base articles that could be written about this for ServiceNow.  [In terms of whether IT would take this on, it was clear early on that not supporting this would not be an option.  However, there are ways to support a tool without over-promising and without excessive makework.]  

A lean team from ITS spent a few weeks exploring the tool, talking to a faculty/admin who was using the tool in diverse ways, touching bases with some IT professionals supporting MS Teams (for general collaborative work) and developers who could wire up various connections between information technology systems, and consulting with an administrator. 

In line with the ever-growing complexity of socio-technical systems, MS Teams is a fairly complex tool.  The are four basic flavors of a team, with different default settings which highlight particular functionalities.  At base, though, a Team is comprised of the following elements:  

The Class template for a team includes various base resources:  posts, files, class notebook, assignments, grades, and a wiki.  The Assignments tab enables the creation of assignments and quizzes, including from other existing Teams.  

Some instructional design (ID) questions that were asked prior to the research (to help focus the work).  These included the following:  

  

Some light walk-throughs of the tool followed.  Initially, one had to acquire not only a different sense of the graphical user interface (GUI) but also terminology.  Then, some pros were observed:  

But in comparison to a built-up LMS, there were some shortcomings:  

More about the general pros and cons may be seen here.  

As with every socio-technical tool, MS Teams has enablements and constraints, strengths and limits.  (Figure 1)  

 

Figure 1:  MS Teams for Teaching and Learning (Some Technological Enablements) 

From these initial observations, it was possible to arrive at some observations about some requirements for instructional designs.  

1. Learner orientation.  To harness the MS Teams space for teaching and learning, it makes sense to orient those who arrive at the space, so that they understand how to use the space and what to do and where to go sequentially.  This may mean that there is a README file…or Notebook…or a posting in the first Channel.  (The labels for the various tools are not re-nameable…but it is possible to start new channels with new names down the left menu…or instantiate new tabs in the horizontal menu at the top…and to name these.)  Others set up folders with contents that explain the use of the space and even set up folders for respective students to drop their work (and potentially to receive comments).  

2.  Empowered learning.  It was also clear that the settings should allow learners a full range of capabilities in interacting with the system and with each other.  They should be able to post messages, create videos, hold synchronous meetings, chat live, and so on.   They should be able to co-edit work (albeit in non-destructive ways).  They should be able to share files. They should be able to receive direct emails from the instructor and peers (through Outlook, for example).  

3.  Constructive sociality.  It makes sense to enable constructive sociality, where learners can create a sense of their own telepresence and to engage each other constructively.  

Then, finer points depend on the particular learning domain, the learning context, the way MS Teams is harnessed, and other factors.  It was clear that this tool could not really serve as a fully functioning LMS in a higher education context given the needs for particular functionalities, various systems integrations, and perhaps some legal considerations—at least in our particular context.  MS Teams could be used as a complementary tool, though, for formal and informal courses using other technologies as the main base for the teaching and learning, record-keeping, formal assessment, grade computations, and so on.  

Where it would make sense to bring MS Teams into play in a stand-alone way were as follows.  

Table 1:  Some Types of Learning in Higher Education that “Fit” with MS Teams 

Some Types of Learning	Brief Descriptions
Short courses	Formal and informal learning sequences without excessive complexity (and low time duration)
Project-based learning	Formal and informal learning based on collaborative learner work around a defined project
Virtual learning community	The coalescing of individuals around a shared learning interest (with varying roles of the learners and fairly high interactivity and mutual support)
Design studio	Creation, sharing, and critique of designs

This is not to say that others cannot harness MS Teams very effectively for formal learning at various levels from K12 through higher education.  For this local context, however, it seemed that MS Teams was valuable for a less formal teaching and learning approach…and the technology would work optimally in a complementary relationship with an LMS.  

How structured or freeform the various spaces are can vary, depending on needs.  In many ways, how successful a learning experience is in MS Teams is not based on the technology but the learners and the instructor, the practiced conventions of the learning domain, the social engagements, the meaningfulness of the tasks, the motivations of the learners, the learning goals, the sense of community, and other human factors.  

Shalin Hai-Jew works as an instructional designer at Kansas State University.  Her email is shalin@ksu.edu.  

Thanks to Aziah McNamara, Robert Howard, Hongfu Chen, Charles Appelseth, Scott Finkeldei, and others, for their support in the initial work that was the basis for this article.