2.4 Software: Microsoft Teams and Moodle Virtual Learning
Environments
Since the students came from two campuses, Microsoft Teams was used to
facilitate their collaborations. Additionally, Microsoft Teams, and
other collaborative software such as Slack, are now widely used in most
workplaces, making Teams proficiency an important employability skill.
Prior to semester start, 6 Microsoft Teams environments were created,
one for each theme. A class notebook (uses built-in OneNote) was set up
in each Team. The collaboration space section was where all the student
could see and add to the content. To partition the large amount of new
information (such as how to keep meeting minutes, legalities of filming
in public or conducting interviews and the risk assessment forms for
students working off campus) subsections were made to contain each type
of information (Figure 2). Once students were allocated to their
Microsoft Team they added sections to the collaboration space to suit
their own needs. Important files such as fliers to give the public, the
risk assessment forms, a short tutorial on using Microsoft Teams
(Supplementary Material 2) and PDFs of the 4 team training tutorials
were all uploaded to the ‘Files’ area of each Team (Figure 3). As
semester progressed the groups used the ‘Posts’ page to communicate with
their other members and with the lecturer (Rasmussen) and had group
meetings using the video call option.
Additionally, the University of Nottingham uses Moodle as a virtual
learning environment. As such students also had access to all the
lecture slides and recordings via Moodle and poster submission and team
contribution forms were uploaded by each student to the assignment
submission box by each deadline. The storyboard was left in the
Microsoft Team environment and discussed during the lesson. The video
files were uploaded to the class-wide Microsoft Team (created during
semester to provide additional information about strike action and the
COVID-19 advice).
For filming and editing footage, students used their own cameras or
mobile devices and were provided with a series of links to open-source
software. This was important as students have different mobile and
computer devices so finding a flawless one-size-fits all is not trivial.
However, there are plenty of options available and in the ‘real world’
they will most likely be making their own decisions on what software is
most appropriate. Support was offered for trouble shooting if needed,
however each group managed to successfully source and implement
software.