At Australia’s Griffith University, lecturers and course convenors are encouraged to take their time to respond to their student’s questions on Microsoft Teams.

Often, if the lecturer holds off for a bit, another student jumps into the channel on Teams and answers their classmate’s question, or at least gets discussion started among students.

It’s a deliberate ploy by Griffith University to encourage deeper learning.

“Learning is conversation,” said Professor Nick Barter, Dean and Director, Learning Futures at Griffith University and Academic Director of Griffith Online.

“We learn through the art of conversation and the back and forth of conversation.

“What we tell convenors is if you’re in Teams all the time, you suck the oxygen out of the room. If you’re in there answering students’ questions, you don’t get them cross collaborating because then they’re just waiting for you to answer all the time.”

Professor Barter said students instead answer their own questions and start to push around their ideas.

“This is exactly what you need for real learning to take place,” he said.

“You need them to be talking to each other and conversing with each other, then testing those ideas, when appropriate, with the convenor.”

SWOOP Analytics has the data to prove Griffith University’s approach to online learning is working. In SWOOP’s 2021 analysis of almost 100,000 teams on Microsoft Teams, the university had 24 teams in the top 0.2%.

Almost half of the 24 teams were student-led teams, about 40% were staff-led teams and the remainder were university clubs and associations or research teams. Most of these teams had about 5-8 people and were filled with conversation, with replies to just about every post.

Using Teams as a conversation space

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into lockdown, among the hardest hit was the tertiary education sector with campuses forced to close and many international students unable to enter the country of their university, leaving little option but to move learning online.

Griffith University had been using Teams for online classes since 2018 and was well versed in doing so. Even so, more than 800 course Teams sites were created in 2020 to allow courses to continue online when campuses were closed, dramatically accelerating the move to Teams.

Professor Barter says it’s a credit to students, who have embraced the technology to continue their learning online, especially as so many of the top performing teams are student led.

“The fact they embraced it, did their group work through Teams and come out to be a high performing team through SWOOP’s measures is fantastic,” he said.

“It really reinforces that we’ve created these new spaces for conversation.”

Professor Barter says typically we think of conversation as two humans speaking with each other at the same time.

“Our traditional framing of educational conversations are that they have to be face to face, in other words synchronous in time and space,” he said.

“Now they can be two people speaking to each other in different places at the same time, in other words, asynchronous in time and space and this is what Teams enables.”

With SWOOP for Teams, Griffith University is able to see who is collaborating with whom, which teams are performing well, where there may be gaps in collaboration, what types of teams are successful, what topics are most talked about, along with tips on how to improve behaviours on Teams.

Moving university online

Griffith University began using Microsoft Teams for online classes in 2018, mostly for postgraduate and MBA courses, having previously used Yammer as the place for group discussion.

“Teams is more focus and objective based,” Professor Barter said.

“Because it’s more structured, it has more channels, it’s easier to find your way around, it’s much better for teaching. It also has the built-in video meeting capability which is really handy, and file sharing.”

Professor Barter said the fact parts of Griffith University were well established on Microsoft Teams was a huge benefit to the entire university when the pandemic hit.

Within a week of lockdown, workshops were established to teach others how to run classes and courses on Teams.

“Because we’d already been using this in our online space, that acceleration was not from ground zero,” Professor Barter said.

“We were able to pivot that well and effectively and the reason we could pivot that effectively was because we’d built up a way of teaching online that we understood and we were able to share that expertise with everybody.”

The fact Teams allows students and teachers to work asynchronously during the pandemic makes it a valuable learning platform, especially as it allows international students to continue their education.

Governance for team creation

Rather than provide governance guidelines on creating teams on Teams, Griffith University shared best practice examples.

Generally, that involves a “general” channel, along with a channel for each assignment, a channel for webinars and so on.

“We try and be quite liberal and let people follow their instincts but we certainly gave them guidance and reinforced to them that good practice of teaching online is underpinned by a strong communication plan,” Professor Barter said.

In his own class, Professor Barter encourages every student to introduce themselves on Teams and begin to build a connection with classmates.

He has channels for every assignment, where discussion is rich, and a channel for recordings of every webinar, or online class, where students are encouraged to comment.

In the assignment channel, each student is asked to share a summary of their assignment and to comment on at least two other student’s summary.

“It encourages a high level of interaction and it encourages them to talk to each other,” Professor Barter said.

“The reason we do that is because the expert in the room isn’t necessarily me, we’ve got to bring all the students together and force them into conversations with each other for them to unpack their own expertise and put that forward.”

Vivian Wu, a postgraduate student at Griffith University, said it’s sometimes a relief when a fellow student asks a question on Teams that you’ve been wanting to ask. It’s also a help that the course convenor has to answer the question just once for all to see, rather than multiple times in an email or personal chat.

“From a student perspective, when there’s another student posting the same question you’re thinking; ‘It’s not just me. Another person has the same question’. So it’s that feeling of being included. And that helps you to feel; ‘Oh great, the answer is there’ and the convenor addresses it just once,” Vivian said.

She said the meet and greet in Teams has been a great way to get to know classmates on a social level, and those connections have built greater trust for sharing of assignments and questions in other channels.