The project involved the use of Microsoft Teams for final year dissertation student supervision. The rationale for using teams was that with 13 project students to supervise, most of whom are working on individual projects, email was a slow, cumbersome and potentially error prone method of working. For example, students may attach different versions of their research protocol to different emails. Finding the correct and most recent version of the document proved tricky in previous years. From a communication point of view, it is difficult to keep track of a vast number of emails received over the course of the year and a central store of all communication between the student and myself was preferred.
This year I have used Microsoft Teams with ten of my project students. All these students were undergraduates in their final year. For each student/group, a separate team was created. All communication is now carried out via Teams’ conversation tool rather than email and files are deposited in the files section rather than being attached to emails.