Vesna Kolenc Potočnik, Bogdan Škof, DOBA Fakulteta za uporabne poslovne in družbene študije Maribor

The masters study programme at DOBA Faculty, which runs fully online, is faced with numerous challenges on how to enable distance teamwork and ensure a high quality of such teamwork. Students work using synchronous and asynchronous communication. In this respect, we focus on the challenges that accompany the implementation of team tasks at a virtual meeting with the teacher, which were solved by including additional tools to the ones offered by the Blackboard learning environment (Forum, Blog, Wiki, Tasks, File Exchange), i.e. tools offered by Blackboard Collaborate and Microsoft Office 365. Blackboard Collaborate is a virtual classroom that allows for video, audio and chat communication between the teacher and students in the team. The teacher can assign students (or they can assign themselves) to individual virtual rooms where they communicate in teams, while the teacher can move through the teams and monitor their work, provide advice and answers their questions. The students prepare their assignments in documents that are saved in their cloud (OneDrive) and that can be simultaneously edited by using Office Online tools (Word, Excel, OneNote). When the assignment has been completed, the teacher can return all students to the main virtual classroom, where they can present their products to all teams. The introduction and integration of new tools, which enable greater efficiency (time), better communication and better text formatting and editing options, has thus ensured higher quality of virtual teamwork.