In what has been an extraordinary year to work in digital learning, Alastair Gemmill, Senior Learning Technologist, reflects on how he and the Ed Tech team developed a series of training sessions to ensure learning and teaching staff were ready for the start of a mixed mode term in October 2020.
As part of the faculty’s preparation for Autumn 2020, the Ed Tech’s Maintenance and Review Team were tasked with designing training sessions to familiarise staff on using MS Teams for teaching. The sessions started in July 2020 and comprised 50-minute sessions which explored MS Teams features, considered the hardware requirements and discussed how staff plan to deliver remote teaching.
We originally scheduled 4 sessions a week for 10 weeks and estimated that around 200 staff would book a place, but to date over 450 staff have attended training, mostly delivered by Learning Technologists Mecnun Karayijit and Marcel Wilson-Roe. Due to increased demand, we added a further 8 sessions.
Feedback has been very positive with a 16% increase in confidence levels post-training and average rating of resources as 4.2 out of 5. We collected feedback and were delighted that attendees spoke highly of the sessions:
“The training session provided many useful tips and was delivered very well.”
“Friendly and approachable delivery, thank you.”
“…it was very helpful and the presenters very knowledgeable”
In response to demand from the community we are now offering virtual whiteboard training covering annotating using MS tools, using a second device to annotate virtually, replicating a visualiser using mobile devices and collaborative whiteboards. Over 90 staff have signed up for this complementary workshop.
Overall, while the summer preparation period has been busy, we feel excited by the enthusiasm of staff to develop their teaching in new ways and are confident that the term will be off to a good start.
Sign up for Teams for Teaching training
Sign up for Virtual Whiteboard training
Self-help guidance is available on the Staff Help site
Sign up for Instructional design support
If you have any questions on use of Teams for teaching or other training requests please email the Ed Tech team