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.