Team Builder is a tool that was built for the UNSW Faculty of Engineering and has been integrated into UNSW Moodle.
What is a Team Builder?
Team builder assigns students to groups based on their answers to a series of questions that teaching staff can specify. The idea is to:
- define the different roles to be performed within the group activity
- formulate multiple-choice questions so as to identify the students best suited to filling those roles, then
- distribute those students evenly among a specified number of teams.
Team Builder can be used to set up teams containing an array of students with complementary skills. For example, if each group needs a leader, a report writer, a person who's good with maps and someone who owns and can operate a good-quality digital camera, Team Builder can be used to identify students with each of those qualities and skills, and to build teams containing them all.
The benefit of Team Builder is that it involves less work for instructors than manually assigning students to various groups, but offers them more control than having Moodle auto-create groups, building teams intelligently on the basis of specifications that are designed by the teaching staff.
Team Builder is a flexible tool that allows the creation of predicates that can range from very straightforward to quite complex. It really is a good idea to either watch the demonstration video created by UNSW Engineering, or consult a colleague who is practised at using Team Builder, before attempting to construct a Team Builder activity of any complexity.
Before starting using Team Builder, teaching staff need to decide what qualities will be necessary for students to fill the various roles needed in each group, for the group activity.
Also, if only certain students in the course should be selected during this exercise, create a group of them.
Create a Team Builder activity
Team Builder activity can be added to the Moodle course by clicking "Add an activity or resource" and selecting Team Builder from the pop-up activity chooser. When setting the activity Open date, make sure to select date and time in the future to allow adding of questions. Once the open date is reached, no questions can be added or edited.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Add questions to Team Builder
Once the Team Builder activity is created, teaching staff can go in and create a questionnaire for students to complete. Questions should be entered in order as there is no way to rearrange them or edit, only to delete and add at the end.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Create team-building criteria
Once students respond to the set questions in the Team Builder, teaching staff can go back to the settings and set the team building criteria. These will be based on students' answers. Teaching staff should consider if they want to have teams with equal student numbers or teams based on the criteria met.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.