The features available in Teams are constantly being added to and evolving for the many use cases in business and education settings.

ILTS have been trying to collect some of the lesser-known features and tips to share. Feel free to add some more tips to the comments below!

Meetings

Roles in Meetings

It is worth noting that some of the features described in this section are only available if you are the “organiser” of the meeting, which means you were the person who setup the meeting. The most obvious tasks where this would be relevant to teaching scenarios is for managing breakout rooms or downloading attendance sheets.

It is possible to set the roles of a meeting in advance or during the session, the instructions for this are below:

Roles in a Teams meeting

Meeting Recordings

You will find the option to record a meeting from within the “ellipsis” menu button at the top of your meeting window.

Record a meeting in Teams

If you are recording meetings for your class you need to make sure these recordings are readily available and accessible. Your recording will be stored by default within the Teams space for 20 days and is accessible from the meeting instance.

Note: ILTS have been working with Information Services to get this 20 day restriction removed. All Semester 2 course organisers have now been moved to a license which removes this restriction. If you are still seeing this restriction within your Team, please get in touch with us asap.

You can choose to move your video to storage in OneDrive / Stream, or choose to download your recording and upload it to the Media Hopper Create service. In both instances you must ensure that you have enabled the auto-captioning feature.

This process is changing across Teams in early 2021 – up-to-date guidance on how to link/share meeting recordings can be found below:

Play and share a meeting recording in Teams

Benefits and Disadvantages of Transitioning from Media Hopper Create to MS Stream

Attendance Tracking

Meeting organisers can download a spreadsheet of all participants of a Teams Meeting. You can find this option at the top of the participants panel from within the team meeting.

Microsoft Teams – Create Attendance Report for Online Class Lecture

Polling

In the classroom it can be really useful to do quick snap-polls to trigger some engagement with the class, gauge reactions, spark debate.

Using the integration with MS Forms it is possible to link polls/surveys to your meeting to be complete before or during a meeting. MS Forms is a really useful survey tool as a standalone solution but the integration means it is possible to direct participants to the poll from within the meeting.

Poll attendees during a Teams meeting

TopHat is of course available as an alternative to Forms if you already use this service for class interactions.

Breakout Groups/Rooms

The use of breakout groups has been a long-standing requirement of virtual classrooms to allow for smaller discussions, sub-topics, activities, etc. This functionality has recently been added to MS Teams and can be triggered by the meeting Organiser.

Use breakout rooms in Teams meetings

Note this functionality is only available in meetings with multiple participants (not just 1-1 or small meetings). This functionality is only available via desktop clients.

Raise Hands

Raising hand in a busy session is a polite way of alerting the host of the session that you wish to contribute without interrupting the flow of the meeting. The functionality is very simple and available to all participants. If multiple hands are raised the participants will be placed in the order that the hands were raised.

If you are chairing a meeting it can be a good idea to let participants know that they may need to raise their hand before the floor will be open to them.

Raise your hand in a Teams meeting

Noise Suppression

If you are attending a meeting from a particularly noisy location: air-con in the office, a busy café, or working from home while home-schooling, then you can turn on noise suppression to try and minimise the background noise when your mic is turned on.

Reduce background noise in Teams meetings

Best practice is to have all microphones off for all those who are not speaking. We would also strongly recommend the use of headphones for all participants to minimise feedback.

Zooming-in

Not to be confused with the other video conferencing platform – it is possible to zoom-in and zoom-out of the contents being shared to screen to make things more clear to see, something especially useful if working from a small screen or window.

Similar to how you might increase or decrease your browser contents you can use Ctrl or Cmd +/- depending on your device.

Zoom in and out of Teams

Notifications

Customising Team/Channel notifications

As we are all becoming involved in an increasing number of teams, the amount of content and activity you need to be aware of and prioritise becomes a challenge. Some of your spaces might be of just general interest, so choose to browse at your leisure; there are some spaces that you might check on a more regular basis; and some that you want to have your finger on the pulse for so you can react to the latest posts.

The notifications allow you to customise your general settings as well as the settings on a per team and channel basis. You can also choose what notifications you should be emailed about.

Manage notifications in Teams

Using the @ tag for triggering notifications

If you want to make sure that important content is not missed you can force notifications to be sent out to specific people or to members of a team or channel by using an @mention. In your comment start typing @ and you will be able to pick from a list of individuals or channels if you want to highlight something to them in a post or reply.

If you forget to include your @mention then the person may not be notified, especially if the post is a reply to another post.

Use @mentions to get someone’s attention in Teams

More…

I’m sure many of you will have found a handy tip that has improved the way you use/manage the content in Teams. Please feel free to share using the comments below and we can try and incorporate these in future posts and guidance.

Gradescope is now the School of Informatics’ default platform for marking exams and some coursework assignments.

The technology takes a much more innovative approach to marking which better aligns to the standard practices for marking paper-based exams, with some added benefits over traditional marking.

• Horizontal marking (i.e. Mark papers by question) by default
• Rubric based marking, with the option of dynamic edits which recalculate previously marked papers
• Inline annotation / notes for markers

The exam spaces and initial setup is now managed by the ITO team.

Marking Submissions

You’ll find detailed help and guidance from the Gradescope Help section, but some key elements and videos have been highlighted in this article.

Horizontal Marking

The preferred marking workflow is to mark each question across all submissions, rather than marking a whole paper one submission at a time. The interface for marking is set up this way to apply your mark to the question and then proceed to the next ungraded question.

Rubric Marking

The points per question will be setup prior to the exam. The rubrics will use positive marking by default. Ahead of the exam, course organisers will have a chance to discuss with ILTS how they want their rubric initially setup for all questions. One of the key features for Gradescope is that the rubric can change and be adapted throughout the marking process with the changes being reflected in papers that have already been marked.

Making changes to the rubric can be done by any marker and could be for the following reasons:

• Tagging responses marked in a certain way
• Tagging responses for additional review
• Awarding partial points based on certain criteria
• Realising the original rubric design needed altered

Grading a Simple Question

Some tips

Students map their questions to the pages submitted

As part of the submission process students are asked to map which questions have been answered on which page of their PDFs. Some question components may be answered across multiple pages. You can check to see if there is an additional page by using the next arrow or using the “K” keyboard shortcut.

Rubric components can be scored the same and culminative

You can use rubric components for identifying features of how a question has been answered. You can award a rubric item the same points as any other rubric element. This allows you to allocate marks while identifying features of how the question was answered. You can then report on the marking breakdown by each rubric component to get a detailed understanding of how each question was answered across the cohort.

You can select more than one rubric element for each question and the score can build a running total. These settings can be customised and configured as required.

Moderation during the marking process

A suggested workflow for moderation during the marking process is as follows:

• CO marks first sample of questions to confirm the rubric fits well
• Markers continue to mark remaining questions
• CO reviews rubric changes and areas for attention in stages throughout the marking process
• Papers can be filtered based on the rubric criteria to look for anomalies
• Standard moderation after marking can still take place

Keyboard Shortcuts

To help speed up marking Gradescope uses a number of keyboard shortcuts to apply the rubric components using the number keys, and you can traverse your stack of marking using a number of keyboard shortcuts.

An overview is available via the video below:

Grading Even Faster with Keyboard Shortcuts

Practice exam

Finally, we would like to stress the importance of running a practice exam, using Gradescope accessed via Learn. As with the real exams, the ILTS team will set these up, but you should identify a suitable timescale to run these, and ensure all students have completed this process prior to the date of their real exam.

Feature requests?

If you are interested in the development of Gradescope, you can view and contribute towards their roadmap here:

• https://trello.com/b/36UN761q/gradescope-roadmap

There are a wide-range of assessment options built into or integrated with Learn. Each assessment has its own workflow and a plethora of settings to choose from.

In this blog post we look to highlight some of the common issues, quirks, and key settings to be aware of.

This is part of a series of blog posts related to Tests and Assignments:

• Understanding Test Options
• Learn Assessment “Gotchas”

Learn Assignments

Due Dates

Assignments should have a date/time when submissions should be made by. This date will send notifications to students as the due-date approaches.

We recommend a due-date in working hours so that support is available from ITO or ILTS for any issues that might arise around the submission. So a deadline that is on a Friday at 5pm is not ideal.

Upload Progress

There is no progress bar displayed to students to indicate that the file submission is being processed. The browser will also not show a “spinny-wheel” in the tab to indicate that the page is processing. Students should be instructed to only click the submit button once and be patient.

When the file is submitted the student will be able to see their submission and will receive an email confirmation.

Submission Receipts

When a Learn Assignment is successful the student will receive a submission receipt via email. The students can also see a list of their receipts from their Grades panel which they can access from the top-right of any page.

The general rule is worth following: “if a student does not have a copy of their submission receipt, the submission has not been made.”

Anonymity

Marking should be done anonymously in the majority of assessment scenarios. In Learn Assignment the anonymity settings are very strict – it is not possible to see which student have submitted, and it is not possible to review any attempts related to a specific student until anonymity has been removed.

We recommend setting the anonymity-release date in the future and then changing this when you are ready for anonymity to be removed.

Gradebook

Visible to students

Any activity within Learn that can have a mark associated with it (formative or summative) will have an entry in the Gradebook, which is located in one of the tabs across the top of the course Learn page. The default option for the column is to have the grade visible to students.

By opening up the entry for an assessment, you can choose whether to hide or show it to students.

Calculated Items

The calculated and weighted items are a great way of aggregating grades across activities. However sometimes a calculated item can sometime release a grade from a hidden entry which it is related to.

We recommend taking time to review and manage your Gradebook. You can find out more about navigating the Gradebook here.

You can get in touch with lt-support@inf.ed.ac.uk if you need further support.

Hybrid Teaching put additional emphasis on the content and communication that comes from your Learn course. We have already looked at the way the Informatics courses follow a standard structure to give some consistency to students to help them know where to look for content… but what additional signposting could we consider?

As course materials will sit on Drupal now and course admin on Learn, it is especially important that students know where to go to find what they need. Find out more about the communication tools available on our blog post: Communicating with students

Some Assumptions

Below are a series of contexts and assumptions that we might expect your students to follow during the semester. We have tried to outline some of the things that a student might expect from the course and have offered some tips on ensuring this information is clearly signposted to them.

Student Behaviour

Below are some loose assumptions about the primary audience for your course, the students:

Some students will not read everything

• Use headings, summaries, and bullet points to present important information in a concise manner
• Don’t bury important information in long prose
• If there is a “call to action” for the student make this clear and include a description of what is expected of them

Some students don’t know what they are looking for

• Provide guidance and pointers to help a student get started
• Announcements are a good way of providing a timely narrative to support your course content – these are generally displayed chronologically so can provide an overview as the course evolves through a semester

Students are not yet subject matter experts

• Avoid using language or concepts in the titles that the student may not yet be familiar with
• Provide overview of what the student is expected to learn in each week / topic unit
• Reference materials that might be pre-requisite or used for revision purposes

Students are juggling multiple courses with varying schedule and deadlines

• Make sure the course schedule is clear
• What synchronous events might be taking place

Students are likely having to plan their own self-study workload

• Provide an overview of how much time a student is expected to spend in a week
• Give insight into which materials are essential reading/viewing, and which might be additional information only, or just for fun/consolidation
• Some students will want to make sure they read everything that is posted to the course, so if you include information that is a reference only you might need to indicate that this is not core-reading

Students might not be able to follow the standard course structure/timeline – this could change at any point during the semester

• Is it clear where recordings or alternative materials are located?
• Is there a summary of what a student is required to do each week?

Students might not realise that an element in Learn needs to be clicked for more information

• Try only using a short description/summary in clickable elements in Learn as these can often be overlooked by students
• Provide the full information from within the folder/section
• Use a different colour for the link

Why/When are students accessing the course?

Based on previous work students tend to access courses for the following reasons:

Start of term – just browsing all content

• Check the course readiness article (2022 update) for what is expected for Week 0
• If content is not visible and is due to be released, give an indication to students of when materials will be available and where to find them.
• Scheduled items in Drupal and hidden items in Learn do not show anything at all, not even a placeholder. If all content is hidden a student will see an empty page.

Week to week, looking for specific materials to support their studies for a specific week

• Be sure to identify the week number in titles and links, you can include the date too if relevant
• Try to also include a title or summary of the topic for that week, this will make it easier to find materials when reviewing.
• Announcements are a great way of setting the scene for the week’s teaching.
• In Drupal, using either the schedule table or having a page for each week of the course makes it easy for students to navigate to what they need

Take part in set learning activities

• If there are set actions, dates, and deadlines required for a student to participate be sure that the instructions and link to activity is displayed clearly and consistently
• It is useful to add an announcement at the start of each week identifying what is expected of a student. Please see this example of an announcement, with the option ticked to also send it as an email, from Week 2 of AML (with thanks to Oisin for letting us share this): Applied Machine Learning (2022-2023)[SEM1]- AML Week 2 Instructions.pdf

Revision of topics before some form of assessment

• If materials are organised by week is it still clear which topics and areas where covered in those sections
• Give content meaningful titles and summaries so resources are not just referenced by Week 1, Lecture 1 – this shows when the lecture took place but not what it covered.
• You can add links to your content in Drupal. This allows you to link to content in a different section without having to duplicate content.

Looking back at courses studied in previous years

• Students have access to their courses studied in previous years and may wish to review content so meaningful titles can aid them in finding the materials they are looking for

Following up on an announcement / notification in Learn

• Many students will use the email or Learn app notifications to trigger them to accessing the course
• Announcements and notifications are pooled into separate lists on the app to make it easy for a student to see all activity across their Learn courses from a single feed without having to navigate each course individually looking for updates.

Signposting and Structure

The above information is looking at how information could be presented to students to make sure it is easy to find and presented consistently. We have touched a little on what content you might want to include in your course setup – but we have listed some outlines of content that a student might be expecting to find in your course.

Take a look at the list below and think about whether this information is available within your course, and if it isn’t, how would you expect the student to find it?

Expected Content

Below is a summary of the type of information a student is likely to expect within your Learn course:

• Course Information
  • What is the course all about?
  • What is expected of me in this course?
  • Is there a timetable/schedule of teaching and deadlines?
  • Who is running the course, who can I contact if I need help?
• Course Content
  • What information do I need to prepare for teaching activities?
  • What is happening this week?
  • What should I have learned about this topic?
  • Where can I find the materials used during the teaching?
  • Is there a live teaching session or is it only via recording?
  • How much time should I set aside for this?
  • Is there additional reading or revision materials I should be looking at?
  • Does the teaching refer back to any of my previous studies?
• Assessment
  • What am I being assessed on?
  • When do I need to submit my assessments / when are assessments taking place?
  • How will I be assessed?
  • How do I submit my work?
  • When will I get my feedback?

Test it out

Sometimes as a course organiser you can be a bit too close to the material to view the materials as a student would. You can use Student Preview in Learn or paste a Drupal URL into a private web browsing window to see what a student can see in your course, but you will need to try and think about the questions above to see if you can find the information that a student would expect to see.

Alternatively why not get a friend or colleague to try the course out as a student would to find  specific information. Sometimes a person with no background knowledge of your subject area can be a great person to test the structure of your course; ideally the course should be usable without prior knowledge of the subject.

Your course will likely be made up of a number of patterns that will be replicated across the duration of your course. For example the majority of courses will likely break down their course materials by Week, creating folders within the Course Materials area in Learn for Week 1, Week 2, etc.

You can read the University’s detailed overview of Macro and Micro Patterns here.

Macro Patterns

We have already touched on courses being broken down by Weeks. Each week might consistently have 2 lectures, 1 tutorial, and every other week have a group assignment. Your course should reflect this within the course materials and provide the outline to this from within the structure.

Micro Patterns

If using a flipped classroom approach, the way that you choose to deliver your lectures will likely also follow some “micro-pattern”. In your lectures you might consistently structure them as:

If you can think about how your weekly content might be broken down in this way and represented in your course website, you can quickly repeat these structures for the materials giving your students a consistent and manageable experience.

If you are unsure how to identify these patterns and present your content and activities to students then please contact LT-support@inf.ed.ac.uk or attend one of the Consultancy drop-in sessions for further discussion.

In the recent Exploring Whiteboard Approaches blog post we shared different ways of presenting mathematical writing using whiteboards we touched on how OneNote might be used as a tool for demonstrating handwritten content as well as a collaborative space for mathematical note taking.

To expand how how to use this approach we have added some further explanation below:

Writing Maths with OneNote

OneNote is an ideal note-taking tool that allows for simple hand-writing tools to be used, but also have a convert to maths function available.

• Create math equations using ink or text with Math Assistant in OneNote
• Change handwritten ink to text or math in OneNote for Windows 10

Writing with the ink and creating a conversion is relatively straight-forward, by using the “Fix it” option you can quickly sub-select components of your handwriting to find alternative symbols used in your maths writing.

This will need to be tried with your handwriting and device to test for suitability.

Use in Tutorial Session

To broadcast live annotations I would suggest the following approach if you have a desktop/laptop with stylus/tablet setup.

1. Use desktop/laptop for Blackboard Collaborate, and choose to share your screen
2. Use the tablet input to write your maths on OneNote
3. Your annotations will appear on the shared screen after a short delay

Potential Issues

• There are some reports the convert to maths option is not available on some tablet app versions of OneNote
• If broadcasting your screen from a desktop, but writing on a tablet with OneNote there may be slight lag in updating the Cloud version
  • Alternative is to use tablet or Wacom tethered to desktop to use OneNote

Heather Yorston has been using a similar approach and gave a short overview of this at a recent Teaching Hour with a session titled, “How do I teach Maths online?”.

The questions around whiteboard approaches and mathematical writing have come up numerous time throughout the summer. There has been some really interesting discussion within the School of Informatics as well as more widely within the College.

Unsurprisingly, there is no single solution that solves all of the scenarios raised by colleagues. A good starting point is to consider the ways that you might want to use a whiteboard – we have summarised some solutions to the following approaches below:

• Live demonstration to students
• Recorded demonstration to students
• Collaborative whiteboard tutorial

The following approaches are suggestions and not the only solution. You can check out further suggestions and alternatives via the Hybrid Teaching Technology and Tools Finder.

Live demonstration to students

If you are delivering teaching via a video conferencing tool / virtual classroom you may wish to demonstrate handwritten content that you would traditionally use a whiteboard for within a classroom.

First consider if you prefer to work with digital ink or using a standard pen and paper approach.

Digital Ink

Although writing with a mouse or trackpad is possible it is often an unnatural feeling for many people, with many preferring to use a stylus attached to a computer or used directly on a tablet device.

Both Collaborate and Teams have a whiteboard that offer some basic writing and annotation tools for whiteboards. These tools are often sufficient for quick demonstrations, but do have some limitations. It is important to note that any content created in the Blackboard whiteboard will be removed at the end of the session so a screenshot should be taken if you would like a digital copy.

An alternative tool is to use OneNote, you can broadcast your screen when writing in OneNote, but there are two additional advantages in the way that the content can be shared to students, and the writing can be converted to Math writing.

A description for how to broadcast your OneNote in a Virtual Classroom can be found in this additional post.

Pen & Paper

It may be that the easiest approach is to use pen and paper, and carefully positioning a camera or additional video-source you can broadcast your paper to the room.

You can choose the video source that you wish to share in both Collaborate and Zoom, additionally you can choose to join a meeting from an additional device such as a smart phone to use this as your additional camera source.

With a small tripod and a well-lit workspace you can share your handwritten work to the rest of the virtual classroom.

Recorded demonstration to students

You may prefer to record your demonstration as a standalone resource. This can often make it easier to focus on the task without having to consider other aspects of the technology compared to running a live demo. Another benefit of pre-recording is that the resource can be used on its own in addition to any other teaching activity.

Screen Recording or Recorded Meeting

As above, you can record your demonstration using the same tools and approaches you would as if you were running a live session. You can record a session (without other participants) in Collaborate or Teams.

How to record and view your iPad screen on desktop

You could also use Media Hopper Create to record your screen of any demonstration taking place on your screen.

Camera and Tripod

Using a camera or smartphone you could record a demonstration on whiteboard, or pen and paper.

Point the camera to a piece of paper at a reasonable distance to allow space for handwriting, but still easily legible.

Notes & Tips

• Beware of autofocus trying to switch between focus of your hand and the paper, this should be relatively minor, and most phone apps allow a fixed focus if required.
• Use a well lit room, but watch out for glare or excessive shadows
• Should be relatively easy to colour correct the footage to white by doing a white-balance on the piece of paper (post production).

George Kinnear in the School of Mathematics has written a blog describing how he uses video to share mathematical writing giving a demo of how to do this using Teams.

On Campus Resources

Most teaching rooms have a high quality visualiser that can be used to broadcast/record paper and pen.

The University has also invested in a number of media recording pop-up studios which are equipped with the equipment that you will need for a high quality recording. Some locations have the option of a “clear board” to allow you to write on a transparent board allowing you and your writing to be visible on screen at the same time.

The studio spaces are bookable in advance and are being supported within current health and safety guidance. For further Information please consult the dedicated Media studios for hybrid teaching web pages.

Collaborative whiteboard tutorial

Using a whiteboard in a Collaborative tutorial it is a little harder to pinpoint a single solution. OneNote is clearly a useful tool as it has collaboration at its core in addition to the multiple handwriting tools.

It is possible to create a Class OneNote document and allow people to work on this as they wish. You could even distribute some proforma templates pages if there are specific tasks or formats you would like the students to follow.

The School of Mathematics recently held a workshop on a variety of approaches to collaborative working with whiteboards. This workshop has been written as a short report investigating how to “Share mathematical work synchronously”. In the report they look at filming their workspace, using an online whiteboard such as notebookcast.com, working on a collaborative document like OneNote or using LaTex in an Overleaf document.

Variety of Tools

As you will have seen there are a variety of approaches to tackle this scenario. The ILTS team are happy to advise if you have a specific use-case that you are considering. I’ve listed tools and resources mentioned in this post as well as some alternatives. Feel free to add more to the list using the comments below.

Hybrid Teaching Technology and Tools Finder

• OneNote
• Blackboard Collaborate
• Teams
• Microsoft Whiteboard

Other tools mentioned by colleagues

• Padlet 
• Explain Everything
• AWW
• NoteBookCast
• Ziteboard
• excalidraw.com
• WhiteboardFox