Reorganizing my courses in Teams

Right when the first semester of remote classes began, I published a post here describing which tools I chose to manage the courses I teach at the Faculty of Law of UnB. I need to recognize that they were not the best choices.

I started using Teams, which is the tool offered by the organization I work for. I don't fall in love with Teams, but I don't think anyone dies. Good or bad, everyone has used the app and knows how things are organized.

Particularly, I hate Teams notifications, because to this day I have not been able to prevent it from sending me an email replicating the notifications already displayed within the application. On the other hand, the video tool is very good and it turned out that this was the only feature I really used.

And what were my biggest mistakes in choosing a multi-app solution?

The first mistake was underestimating the work required to keep a course up to date at the level I intended. Throughout the semester, I realized that the work was much bigger than I imagined and I was unable to fulfill what I promised.

The second mistake was thinking that I could use an information organization model (which is now the rule in customer support) for the organization of an academic course. I ended up realizing that to reach all students you have to change the way your course is displayed as little as possible. Well, if they're the users and they want something that's familiar to them, innovating here is a risk.

The third mistake was assuming that students would use an additional commenting tool to talk to me and each other. That really didn't happen. Not even the students used a resource to talk only to me. So, I was not even successful in the forum, nor in the chat. I ended up giving in to WhatsApp, which was my biggest fear.

My fourth mistake was using a free email sending tool. I confess that I didn't understand what happened right. But the fact is that Mailgun did not have a very good message delivery rate and that Ghost's operation for this type of interaction is not risk-free. Some emails simply did not arrive or were identified as spam.

But I didn't just have mistakes and some things worked very well.

Maintaining a real-time feedback tool was very interesting, as I confirmed the strengths of my course proposal. On the other hand, negative feedback did not come through this channel. I imagine that the student avoids giving negative feedback to his professor until the end of the semester.

Publishing mind maps with the content was a very positive point. Here I didn't have much of a surprise, as it's something I've always known, even before using a feedback tool. In general, any summarized and visual organization is very successful with students.

Finally, another point that worked well - perhaps because it is complementary to mind maps - was the podcast I created. I made a micro-podcast, recorded on Anchor and published on Spotify. It was an interesting experience, as it is very practical to produce content in this way.

That's it. These were my mistakes and successes. From now on, I will use Teams as the main application to teach classes. It's not that Teams is excellent at anything. It's just a platform that everyone knows and on which I can post my recorded classes.

In the next post I will explain which three apps I will continue to use in addition to Teams in the semester that is about to begin.

See you soon!

PS: Here is the post with the promised update: