Background
Group work at University is inevitable. Love it or hate it, it is an essential part of your Higher Education learning experience – and life! Before social distancing measures were put in place, you would have found you and your group sat around a PC either in the library, workshop or laboratory. These meetings would have been essential to discuss progress and create any new actions that needed to be addressed. Every team member may have been writing their own notes, someone may have been elected to take minutes on pen and paper, files may have been shared around with a USB stick and it all got very messy very quickly. Not everyone may have the same notes, paper and USB stick’s lost or forgotten about. It became a management nightmare.
What we did
Microsoft Teams introduced a new, modern, silicon-valley style of working to our team which ironed out all these small complications to teamwork. Everyone can add to the same team notes appended to each meeting. Everyone can drag and drop files to share or work collaboratively on files stored on the team’s SharePoint site and multiple team members can remote control a machine via the screenshare feature built-in. During lockdown we’d quite often be up late at night with four of us sat around a code editor entering lines of code into the same source code file remotely! If anything, Microsoft Teams sped up our collaborative teamwork as it was easier to find a time when we would all be available without the need to book a room or travel. Documents weren’t lost. Everyone received the same meeting minutes. Progress was much quicker. We found Microsoft Teams to be such a success that we completed our group masters thesis spread across different time zones, with some of our team members living in Europe.
