Teams VS. Moodle

This school year, AISG adopted a new online platform for teachers and students called Teams. Teams is a Microsoft program that allows students and teachers to access it both online and offline. While Moodle is still being used, teachers are required to start using Teams by next year at the latest. Assignments, class notes, and other documents can be posted on Teams, which also has a chat function (“Conversations”), and can be used to post and collect assignments. After more than a semester of use, this new platform is preferred by some students, while others favor the soon-to-be-defunct Moodle. 

An ongoing debate exists on whether teachers should continue using Teams. Through asking opinions of several students, the majority preferred Moodle over Teams, because students are already used to Moodle or they think Moodle is easier to access. Twelfth grader Leah L strongly supports Moodle, as she finds Teams inconvenient and unorganized; she says, “Not every teacher uses [Teams], so it makes it harder for me to find resources and stay on task: I wish they can unify them.” Kimmy K, another twelfth grader, also agrees with Leah: “Moodle is much better and Teams is just inconvenient. Some teachers use both systems and it’s very confusing.” In addition to the numerous issues that Teams presents, students also complain that the software is just too slow. Anna K stated, “I get easily annoyed by Teams because it takes so much time to load.” When the system takes a long time to load, students get frustrated and feel that they are wasting their time. Along with the criticism, there are still a minority of students that prefer Teams. Raven H, an eleventh grader, said, “It is easier for teachers to organize work and I find resources easier this year. This is because Teams already divides different sections for students so this makes it very convenient.”  

Another problem with using Teams is that not all teachers are using Teams directly. Instead, most teachers are using OneNote through Teams. Freshman Anna K says she barely uses Teams in class, “Most of my teachers don’t say ‘open Teams’, they say ‘go on OneNote’.” This raises the problem of whether Teams is actually useful or not.

However,  IT director, Mr. Bauer explained that there are way more benefits by using Teams and also cleared our curiosity of the switch from Moodle to Teams.  He said, “Some teachers were already using OneNote when we were using Moodle. They seem to be ahead of other people in many ways as they seemed more organized and were able to use more functions. Since there were several complaints from teachers about Moodle, OneNote seems more efficient and this directly links to Teams. Students that use OneNote also seem to like it, so I sat down with the principals to talk about the two platforms. Since they don’t like having multiple platforms to use, we decided to continue the move to Teams including OneNote.” 

Although there are inconsistencies with Teams, the school is working towards addressing these issues. It is also enforcing Teams as the only online teaching platform for the next school year.

This article is a collaboration between Antonette Liao and Regina Kim.