The work this pilot is based on is that of Dr Helen Eborall from the Edinburgh Medical School. She piloted MS Teams as part of her unit ‘Health in Communities Practical’ within the module ‘Social and Ethical Aspects of Medicine’ with Year 1 MBChB students, advised by the Medical School’s Digital Education Unit.

Context Activities:

• 20 groups of 11-12 students allocated to a GP practice in Edinburgh (16), West Lothian (2) and Midlothian (2).

• Students met* with their GP tutor who provided an introduction to the locality which the practice serves and key health and social factors relevant to the community, then introduced students to a case study vignette.

• Students met* a Community Link Worker and two different third sector organisation representatives, learning about the work of different professionals and organisations and how each could help/support their case study ‘patient’. • Students worked in their groups and sub-groups to undertake additional research online and prepare short presentations for the final session.

• Students returned* to their GP for the final session to present and discuss their findings.

• Students completed an end-of-unit 3000-word report drawing upon their online material throughout the unit as well as their experiential learning from the practical.

*All sessions were conducted remotely via Blackboard Collaborate, Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Health in Communities & Microsoft Teams

We needed a platform to facilitate:

a. Collaborative working between students in their groups to: prepare for the sessions with health and community professionals, share resources from independent research and prepare presentations.

b. Effective communication between the module leader and groups, for example, for urgency or for sharing useful information only relevant to that group.

c. Question and answer forum for the end-of-unit written assessment enabling students to receive fairly quick responses to questions and to check whether similar questions has already been answered, and enabled the module leader to post responses to ‘frequently asked questions’ which students had sent via email (if they were no comfortable posting on the Teams site Activity shown in graphs.

Re engagement, there are two flurries of activity:

1. The final practical session was 2nd March. In the week leading up to this, groups were working together to assimilate the information gained through the first four sessions as well as their independent research to produce three short presentations to deliver to the GP Tutor in the final session. The main activity during this period within the groups’ individual channels included synchronous meetings, resource sharing and collaborative working on PowerPoint documents etc.

2. The deadline for asking questions about the end-of-unit report was 25th March. The weeks of 15th and 22nd March show high levels of activity, largely students posting questions and the module leader replying. The module leader collated the final ‘frequently asked questions’ document and posted this on the site on 28th March Lesson learnt

We created the Health in Communities Teams main channel and group channels as a response to:

a) problems with Collaborate which many groups faced in the first practical session and

b) students finding it difficult to work out how to contact each other (particularly given lockdown restrictions). Introducing Teams part-way into the module was difficult, e.g. if some students had already started using another form of collaboration.

For the 2021-22 year a good model would be to introduce the use of Teams at the start of the unit. The Learning Technologist provided instructions for using Apps (PowerPoint, Word, etc.) within the Teams channels, but some groups persisted in using platforms not supported by the University (e.g. Google docs and What’s App). For the 2021-22 year, good practice would be introducing Teams and MS apps at the outset and making this mandatory for the practical.