Working with Others

In my roles as tutor, materials/module developer and e-champion, I worked within several teams daily, including my discipline teams and wider staff teams.  This required me to communicate at different levels with people from different backgrounds, with different skill levels and with varying needs. For daily activities, I mainly communicated with staff and students via email, MS Teams and Zoom. Email was usually reserved for ‘official’ communication and for formal queries, for example, when I communicated with staff via the Learning Technologies Team inbox.

MS Teams chat and audio/video calls are faster than email and allow for convenient storage and distribution of information and files. Via email, people do not often download and store files and later become frustrated when looking for information; therefore, I found that frequent use of MS Teams was much more useful for everyone. I held one-to-one tutorials and office hours on MS Teams. This was helpful in answering queries as it reduces the time the student spends fretting and enables me to provide timely feedback and also model culturally appropriate communication, which is essential for international students.

Supporting the transition to online and hybrid learning

As mentioned in Operational Issues, I supported various teams in transitioning to online learning by providing basic guidance on adhering to copyright and accessibility requirements, alongside helping them to develop the VLE and e-learning materials, or doing this myself for colleagues pushed for time. I also supported other e-champ colleagues to work better with their assigned teams due to my empathetic, but efficient and informative approach. To ensure modules were ready to be published, it was essential for me to communicate frequently and directly with tutors, e-champs, senior managers and the legal team. This was done via chat, conference calls, email and working collaboratively on documents.