MS Teams for Teaching and Learning

                                   

        The use of e-learning platforms such as MS Teams, Zoom, Moodle, Google Classroom, Udemy etc. increased rapidly after the Covid-19 pandemic. When the covid-19 pandemic happened, all the educational institutions were closed, so, the students were unable to attend their classes, various e-learning and online learning platforms emerged. 

        According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), over 800 million learners from around the world have been affected during Covid-19 pandemic, 1 in 5 learners cannot attend school, 1 in 4 cannot attend higher education classes, and over 102 countries have ordered nationwide school closures while 11 have implemented localized school closure. This gave a huge boost to the e-learning platforms to boost up.

So, here, we will talk about MS-Teams as a means for teaching and learning. We will start from a start with a brief introduction of MS Teams.

        Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) is a learning-business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family. Throughout and after the Covid19 pandemic, Teams and other e-learning platforms gained much interest as many meetings and educational classes moved to a virtual environment. MS Teams is also a means of open and distance learning tools. ‘As of January 25, 2022, MS Teams has about 250 million monthly users.’ [1]

‘MS Teams rolled out in 2017 as part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite of work tools, which is very commonly used in higher education. Initially, Teams was mostly about distributed collaboration on shared projects. However, of late, it has been brought into play for teaching and learning, given the sudden shift to online learning in the initial Covid-19 pandemic.’ [2]

        MS-Teams has contributed greatly to the teaching and learning processes. It, somehow, replaced the traditional way of teaching-learning practices in recent times. Even in Nepal, Teams is being used for teaching-learning practices in the major university, Nepal Open University, for online and distance learning. Teams have helped both the teachers as well as the students for educational purposes. The class template for a Teams includes various base resources: posts, files, class notebooks, assignments, grades and wiki. The Assignments tab enables the creation of assignments and quizzes.

        MS-Teams have gotten particularly important features for teaching and learning. One of the major features of Teams is Chats. Teams allow its users to communicate through chats and also allow the users to format text and ask questions to the tutor. Another important feature of MS Teams is Teams which allow admins and teachers to set up specific teams for classes to join through a specific link or invitations sent by the admins or the teachers.

        Breakout rooms is also one of the major features of MS Teams which allow users to split a meeting into small groups. Users can activate this feature during or before a meeting. There are also some other key features of MS Teams which include channels, Group conversations, Telephone replacements, Meetings. 

        So, to conclude, I think that MS Teams has greatly contributed in the teaching-learning process. MS Teams has helped the students of higher level (bachelors, masters) to complete their courses and degrees in the form of open and distance learning. For a country like Nepal, it's so challenging to open universities in each part of the country, so MS Teams is helping the teachers to reach the students.

 

    References

1.)Tejaswi, Mini (July 28, 2021). "Microsoft Teams has nearly 250 million monthly active users: Nadella". The Hindu. Mini Tejaswi. Retrieved December 2, 2021.

2.)Hai-Jew,S, (2020). Evaluating "MS-Teams" for Teaching and Learning, [C2C Digital Magazine], p.7