Micro-sprints: Moving online
Responding to the Covid-19 pandemic
To date, all our student partnership projects have taken place face-to-face on campus, supported by online project tools [you can read more about the tools we use here]. However, when the university closed its doors and cancelled all face-to-face teaching this week as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic (week commencing 16 March 2020), we made the decision not to cancel the project, but to move it all online instead. Due to the tools and processes we’ve already put in place for teamwork, we were able to move the Micro-sprint online at short notice, using a web conferencing tool as the central point for the session. Although most of the team have experience of using online conferencing tools and attending webinars, using it for co-creation and collaboration was a new experience for staff and students alike.
Web conferencing tools — Google Hangouts and Zoom
As we have been using Google Drive to support our collaborative working, we decided to use Hangouts as our online conferencing tool. Google Hangouts is really easy to use. If you’re logged into your Google account, all you need to do is go to https://hangouts.google.com/ and click Video Call. This will generate a URL that you can share with the team (they need a Google account too). Even simpler, Google Hangouts integrates with Slack so you can start your conference call straight from there. However, we did run into some issues when a member of the team shared their screen so we decided to switch platforms to Zoom. Zoom is another easy to use conferencing tool that staff at The University of Manchester now have full access to via an education site licence. Once we switched, the quality of the sound and audio was much improved and the screen sharing feature a lot smoother. Like Google Hangouts, Zoom also integrates with Slack so that you can start an online conference within project channels.
Reflecting on the session
As with every session, we use the retrospective event of the Micro-sprint to continually improve our processes [you can read more about the importance of the Micro-sprint Retrospective here]. Some students commented that the Micro-sprint worked better online rather than face-to-face because they were able to focus and concentrate on tasks without distractions from other team members. However, the focus of this Micro-sprint was on development where the team were working on tasks individually. In the previous Micro-sprint, we were all gathered around a big table using the ABC Learning Design method to design the course, which might not have translated well online and would have required a lot more planning on our behalf. Not all students felt as positively towards the experience. One commented ‘I don’t know why. I just felt a bit nervous when we were having the online meeting’. This is important to remember as sometimes it is just assumed that students will be ok with new technology and online communication.
Top tips
Moving from face-to-face delivery to fully online is not without its challenges, but it can also bring a new dimension to teamwork. It’s also important to remember that working online as a team is different from participating in a didactic webinar that only provides the opportunity to interact via raising hands, answering polls and asking questions in a chatbox. Here are some lessons learned and some helpful tips for online teamwork:
- Give each other time and space to talk — look for social cues via the team’s video feed
- Make everyone feel comfortable in the online environment, which will be new to some people.
- Let everyone take control and not have one person in charge
- If something is not working, don’t be afraid to change it — there are lots of tools out there that do similar things, find one that suits the needs of the team.
