Four laws of Microsoft Teams

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many schools around the globe to close their doors and relocate learning to virtual environments. Teachers were forced to transition the way they educated – from classroom to computer screen, from co-presence to distance, from hands on to hands off. High school teachers in New Brunswick turned to Microsoft Teams to help safely educate students from a distance. To investigate how Teams uniquely influenced the way teachers constructed, presented and shared knowledge, and how students responded to these approaches, I interviewed eight New Brunswick high school educators who taught in the Teams virtual environment during the 2020–21 school year, the first full school year of the pandemic. This article provides insight into some of the potential impositions and pedagogical constraints Teams placed on teaching practices; in what sense the software guided or limited teacher pedagogy and what challenges and opportunities teachers and students experienced; in what ways Teams might be reshaping ways of thinking, feeling, acting and knowing. As an approach to this investigation, Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s Laws of Media () are employed as an inquiry mechanism by which the generalizable rules, patterns and structures of Teams can be recognized and studied. Through these conversations, I observed the enhancement of anytime/anywhere learning; the obsolescence of the physical classroom; the retrieval of lectures; the reversal of connectedness to disconnectedness. The Laws of Media allow education reformers to gain insight into the effects of using Teams as an educational tool before cultural norms and practices become too entrenched in the system, affording education districts and departments time to understand them and make a judgement on if, how and when Teams will be used.