Instructor coordinates problem-based learning teams
Robin, a professor in the Business School, encourages her students to do a significant amount of group work in her International Business course. Several problems during a term are introduced to students who then may work in teams of 3-5 and need to pull together information from a variety of resources in order to fully address the problem. Student presentations of their work on the problems may be included. Since they often won't get to choose their teammates when they are out in the work world, Robin likes to coordinate the teams herself paying some attention to class schedules, and where students live. Later in the term, a couple problems require each team to have at least one person who has already taken Business Law so she is more concerned with that criteria than the convenience factor when she creates those teams.
This first problem requires the student teams to collaboratively write an executive summary-style proposal for a new American run IT firm that would like to locate in India and serve customers all over the world. Each team has a slightly different scenario. For this first problem she expects the students to have more questions than answers which is the point. Their proposal should give the company fodder as to the important issues they need to tease out in creating this new venture located overseas. The last problem for the term will gather these same teams together to write recommendations about the questions they bring up in this proposal.
From a list of all students in the class, Robin begins grouping the 63 students into teams of 3. Although not scientific, by seeing the program students belong to she can try to put evening MBA's with other evening MBA's to lesson meeting conflicts for the team (her class is on Tuesday evenings so many evening and day MBA's take it at the same time). She likes to see all the groups as she creates them so she can tell how many she's created and how many students are in each. The "bucket" of available students dwindles as she starts assigning them out to groups so she can easily see who hasn't been assigned to a group yet. She names each team with their problem title and then adds a document to each team's space with the specifics of their project. Once all the groups are created, she sends a note to the students to let them know of their group assignments and that she has also given them a collaborative space where they can gather a variety of resources and work on their proposal.
She'll create new teams before the next problem-based project so students have an opportunity to work with a variety personalities, skill sets and experience levels. She'lll need to get back to these initial teams at the end of the term for their final project and is hoping the system will make that easy.
Use Cases: Create group containing members with identical capabilities, View profiles of group members (implicit to assigning based on person attributes), Add members to group, ensure all members belong to another category of group, create group metadata, view group metadata, announce group to members, give group collaboration space
Added by: Daphne Ogle, UCB; based on Georgia Tech's "problem-based learining" use case
Move students between project groups
Note: This is a continuation of "Instructor coordinates problem-based learning teams" above
Robin finds out from a couple of her daytime MBA students that they work part-time most days and have more availability in the evenings and on weekends for their project-based team work. She looks at the teams she set up yesterday and moves both students to a new group with evening MBA's. She also makes a note on their profile so she'll know next time. As luck would have it, 2 new daytime MBA students joined the class after talking to her yesterday. Robin assigns each of them to one of the "short" teams. She does another check just to double check that each student is assigned to a team. Then she sends a note to teams affected by the change letting them know what happened.
Use Cases Included: Move member from one group to another, Add members to group, announce to group
Added by: Daphne Ogle (UCB)