4.3 Enabling resilience: 5 key points
The ease with which we moved to online-only teaching at the onset of lockdown is likely due to the following key points:
1) Microsoft Teams training: The students were already familiar with working in Microsoft Teams from week 2 of the semester.
2) Team cohesion: Students had already interacted in person during classes and the first 2 compulsory team training exercises. This meant they had already developed a rapport making the online interactions less daunting. This can be done online too, but it’s important to facilitate the interaction in that first team session with video calls.
3) Reflection: The third compulsory team training session happened one week after lockdown which meant not only did students reflect on how things had been so far, but were also able to discuss what new challenges they might be facing and get support from the lecturer where needed (for example a lesson on screen-sharing was a common request).
4) Aligned (and frequent) assessment: the poster session was designed for early in semester to ensure students begin work on the research early in semester rather than leaving everything until the Easter break (which happened with the essays in previous years). The compulsory sessions spread through semester were worth a total of 10% and were directly linked to their teams (and timed appropriately – see above). The mark allocation/compulsory status of these meant students actively engaged with their team throughout semester. The students themselves noted how important these compulsory sessions were. The video was worth the most with students also asked to provide a report on each team members contribution – ensuring student accountability.
5) Teaching Adaptability: importantly regular contact (in-person or virtual) between students and with lecturer meant problems and challenges could be adapted as needed starting with the minor flood interruption, and more significantly facilitating student team communication after COVID-19 lockdown.
Finally, a separate point is that the fourth session is a representation of academic negotiation – deciding paper authorship order (many students do not realise this organisation until they do this fourth session). Similarly, co-authors provide an author contribution statement at the end of each manuscript as commonly required by most journals. As such, Session 4 not only ensures students are held accountable for their marks, but also links the video communication task back to a real-world research scenario – the pride of research-intensive universities.