It’s hard for people to get together — everyone’s busy and schedules don’t always align. This is especially true for students, many of whom juggle full course loads with jobs, clubs and volunteer work.
Even if students have time to meet up, they don’t always have space. Many of the meeting rooms open to Science students here at McMaster are booked days in advance, I’m told. Other spaces are too noisy for productive group work.
Collaboration is a central focus of all of my science communication courses. The rationale is simple: Most careers in science communication are very collaborative in nature. Writers, editors, illustrators, animators and other communicators work together to make science accessible and engaging.
I’ve been wondering how to bring more collaboration into my courses given the constraints of space and time. I don’t know the answer, but I think giving students the tools to have meaningful collaborations online may help.
WebEx Teams is one such tool. I use it to communicate with my students and I encourage them to use it to communicate and collaborate with each other.
Students can create their own Teams for small group work. Within those teams, they can share documents, brainstorm on a virtual whiteboard, message each other and schedule meetings. All of the communication is end-to-end encrypted. They can also have video conference calls. And they don’t need to be sitting at the computers — they can do all of these things from their phones.
Most students already use online tools, such as Google Docs, for collaboration. Teams integrates with Google docs and other apps, allowing students to see when another group members has modified a document. I use Teams in this way to collaborate with my colleagues, like Christa. Teams helps us to manage our time, focus our efforts and stay on top of projects — like this blog!
Teams is similar to the tools I’ve used in science journalism workplaces. Even though I sat in the same room as my colleagues, we used messaging platforms like Slack to share information quickly. It’s just the way the industry works today. I know some students and groups of TAs are using Teams daily for communication and collaboration. I’d like to think of ways to integrate Teams into all of my courses, perhaps by requiring students to log action items from their group meetings. This would help me to ensure group members are contributing equally, which is something I assess anyway.
Being able to work with others online and communicate professionally through text or video are crucial skills that we should be fostering in our students. And practically speaking, Teams helps to address the issue of shrinking space and time.