This week we will be hearing from Dr. Bowen Hui. Dr. Hui is Associate Professor of Teaching & Associate Head of Undergraduate Affairs (CMPS) in the Computer Science program at UBCO.
From Bowen:
Teamable Analytics: A Team Formation and Analytics Tool
Forming effective teams for large classes is a challenge for educators due to the complexity of project needs, the diversity of individual characteristics, and the criteria different educators have for forming teams. Although many researchers over the past several decades studied the success factors of a team, there is still little consensus on how a team should ideally be formed. Consequently, how one decides to form teams in a class depends on the domain, classroom context, and pedagogical objectives.
In this demo, we present a web application that offers several algorithms to support the team formation process called Teamable Analytics. Teamable Analytics is compatible with any learning management system (LMS) that uses the LTI protocol. Our tool provides a dashboard for educators to elicit student characteristics and customize how those responses are combined to form teams. In contrast to existing team formation software, our tool supports more use cases for building teams, it provides a general end-to-end solution to the team formation process, it is integrated with the LMS so to minimize data setup and privacy risks, and it makes use of visual analytics to diagnose problematic formations, increase user trust, and monitor ongoing team performance.
To date, our team has integrated Teamable Analytics with the Canvas LMS and completed 7 pilot studies with interdisciplinary classes consisting of 15 to 210 students across both UBC campuses. We are currently seeking collaborators to further the research and development in the visual analytics component of the project.