Figure 3: Files uploaded within each of the 6 Microsoft Teams
environments.
Figure 4: Semester planning. The first week of semester was
27th January 2020, each Monday we had a 3-hour
teaching block which contained lectures (green) workshops (lighter
blues) or programmed team time (dark blue), spring break is 4 weeks
based around Easter (yellow). Assessments included compulsory team
training sessions (2.5% each), poster and storyboard (20%), and the
final video submission (70%). The semester was interrupted by flooding,
strike action (mostly impacting nutrient lectures), and COVID-19.
Figure 5: Student perspectives of teamwork. Percentage of
respondents who love, like, dislike or hate team work (A); Students had
ok or excellent team experiences in Plants and the Soil Environment
(BIOS3015; B); Percentage of respondents that mentioned the listed
detriments (C) or benefits (D) of team work as coded from open ended
responses. N=12 respondents.
Figure 6: Student perspectives of structured team training
program and use of collaborative technologies. (A) Number of
respondents finding different aspects of the course useful: first four
activities were explicit team training workshops, ‘Using Microsoft
Teams’ was a tutorial on how to use the online collaboration software,
the poster session was assessed and student were provided feedback on
science content and video plan and the final point was the number of
respondents who felt having ‘Compulsory Sessions’ was useful. B) Coded
open-ended responses for what students would do differently in their
next team experience. C) the amount that students used different
Features within Microsoft Teams: ‘MT (Microsoft Teams) mobile’
application, ‘Collaboration space’ was within the built-in OneNote Class
Notebook addin, ‘Files’ is the page where students can upload and share
files and ‘Posts’ is where students can have text chat conversations (or
video calls) with the other member of their Microsoft Team. (D) visual
representation of the other collaboration technologies mentioned by
students in an open-ended question - The size of each rectangle
represents the proportion of responses allocated to that feature, the
number of respondents is given in the lower left of each box, FB =
Facebook Messenger. Total respondents = 12; for B and D the total does
not equal 12 because students may have mentioned more than one point in
their response.
Figure 7: Student perspectives of COVID-19 challenges. When
asked about any difficulties they faced completing the assignment, most
comments were related to COVID-19 (A). The size of the boxes (A)
represent the proportion of responses in that code category, the number
of responses is given after each code name. B) Respondents perception of
the impact of COVID-19 on Plants and the Soil Environment (BIOS3015) or
their other courses. (C) the number of comments considered negative
impacts of COVID-19 on their assignment for BIOS3015 and (D) the number
of comments considered neutral or positive impacts of COVID-19 on their
assignment. Total respondents = 12; for A,C,D the total does not equal
12 because students may have mentioned more than one point in their
response.
Data Accessibility Statement
All data from this study are available within the main figures and
supplementary material. All additional resources are available on the
author’s website: https://www.arlab.co.uk/teaching-teams.html. As
in line with our ethics approval all data has been deidentified and
contains no personal information.
Competing interests statement
The authors have no conflicts of interest.
Author Contributions
AR designed and implemented the activities, collected survey results and
wrote the manuscript. QW provided technology support with MS Teams,
helped with data analysis and draft editing.
Acknowledgements
AR would also like to thank Louise Kuchel (University of Queensland) for
ongoing discussions and support with the original team training
implementation in BIOL1030. Similarly, AR would like to thank Robby
Wilson (University of Queensland) for the inspiration of video
assignments. At the University of Nottingham, AR would like to thank
Fiona Mccullough for her support with fitting a non-traditional task
within existing student support frameworks and Kate Millar for support
with ethics questions. Finally, AR would like to thank Martin Broadley,
Darren Wells, Diriba Kumsa, Neil Graham and Andrew French for providing
their expertise to the module and support with marking the videos.