So a couple a days ago I got the queston How can we support student teams working together, when they are all sitting at home?
I had one of my project courses starting Product and production design in April 2020 with 50 students that during 10 weeks go from an existing product, understand customers needs, design possible solution, prototype, production design, and detail design. A fun but intensive course for the students that needs a lot of interaction in the team.
So this year we should perform it on distance!
But I just started redesigning the course adding flipped classrom approaches, like short information videos before the lecture, added interaction like Mentimeter and Mural on and between the lectures.
But how to support the teams?
In the course we have 12 teams with 4 students coached by three faculty members. During normal years students and coaches and students has quite much interactions through formal coach meetings and more informal interactions. We perform biweekly design reviews for all teams where all teams present ther status and get feeback from the theaching team. They also complement the oral presentation with a written project memo that are peer reviewed and also get feedback from other teams.
So this year we missed a lot of the informal interaction both between student-teachers and student-student something that is quite important for communication and understanding.
Implementing status reports at each lecture
So one of the things I implemented first was a status checkup at each lecture (that preceded each design phase). Using Mentimeter it’s quite easy to get feedback from all students.
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| Attendance check in Mentimenter |
Using Mentimeter like this have several advantages, you get the team attendance, and then there is a possibility to aggregate the results from the teams (and still having personal anonymity).
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Individual status update using the Smiley scale.
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We also asked about the teamwork, if the collaboration tools worked well, if they were satisfied with the design phase and if the feedback from the coach was ok.
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| Status update question |
After the lecture, I could aggregate the results (using the Excel export from Mentimeter) to identify teams that need more support, as an example below. Team X and Z need some extra support from the coach, and it seems that Team Y is quite satisfied with the current collaboration.
Aggregated data about the teamwork.
So one of the things that the student was missing was the interaction with their on team and also the informal meetings with other students. So we decided to add different activities in each phase.
And they had to report the result in the next lecture.
- Needfinding phase: Perform a team-building activity
- Design phase: Perform a brainstorming activity with another team.
- Production design: Get feedback on production design ideas from another team.
Also by performing this status check it was possible to follow the teams status over the course.
Reflection
In the end, the teams performed almost as good as when we run the course on campus, they still miss the interaction and they normally spend more time testing and building prototypes that was more difficult working from home.
The teams were also surprised that the teamwork worked so well and that the lectures were almost better (because of the interactions through Murial).
As a general conclusion (with very limited data) it seems like teams that were satisfied with the collaboration got the best grades.
