Problem-Based Learning

MS Teams is a collaboration tool that can fit a variety of purposes. You’ll likely be familiar with it from the perspective of delivering online teaching for students and attending online meetings with colleagues. However, MS Teams can also be a useful teaching and learning tool for collaborative work for students.

You may choose to give groups their own team or create private channels within a module-wide team, but both options give students a collaborative space to share files and organise and host team meetings in an online format.

MS Planner is kanban board style planner that allows teams to create tasks and use buckets to sort tasks by type to help plan a project and manage workflow.

MS Planner is an ideal tool to support problem-based learning as students can identify the different areas, targets or skills they need to address and then the specific tasks they need to achieve these. Tasks can be given deadlines, allocated to certain people, and broken down into smaller steps. Notes and key documents can also be attached to the tasks.

Encouraging students to use MS Planner during problem-based learning not only supports them by providing a structured approach to their self-directed learning, but it also gives them practical experience of a real-world skill that will be applicable in their future places of work.

MS Whiteboard is a collaboration tool that provides a flexible and customisable space for brainstorming and idea sharing. Students can start with a blank canvas and tailor it to their own needs, using the writing or text functions, sticky notes, or even choosing from a range of templates to facilitate their ideation and planning of their project.

Students can either select the templates they find useful, or you can create the Whiteboard in advance and pre-populate the headings or elements of a template before sharing the whiteboard with a group. This provides structured support to groups while still giving them the freedom plan their projects and determine their learning path in the ways that they respond to the prompts and guidance you provide.

An alternative approach is to have the whole class working on the same whiteboard, but with each group being given their own section on which to work. This works well for synchronous sessions as students are able to see the work other groups are doing, which many can find reassuring. The Whiteboard also provides space for students to complete the activity and/or record ideas, which you may then ask them to feed back to the class later in the session.

The timer in the top right corner is a helpful feature when working in this synchronous format; supporting time-keeping within the session and helping to keep students on target.