Teams

One of the things that happens quite a bit in the K-12 world, but not really in the higher ed world of education is teamwork. This is odd as students grow up learning how to work in teams and then when they hit the work world, they will again be required (for the most part) to be team players again. But in the four or five years that they spend as undergrads, they are really only in teams as part of their labs or in specialized programs. In light of the cutthroat nature of undergrads – especially in feeder programs (I can’t swing a bandwagon Sens fan – my jersey is at least five years old – without hitting a Pre-X student), teams seem to be counter intuitive. After all, the students are trying to compete for a limited number of seats in X and they can’t afford to be saddled with S. Slacker and U. Keener who don’t have the same interests or drives.

To change this, not only do courses need to be reworked to think about teamwork as part of the assessment (remember teamwork is not plagerism), but there also needs to be a solid way to evaluate teams, so that students are able to get the experience of team work, but not get their marks unfairly influenced by team members.

Distance or Online or Alternate (do we really need to put the modifier on any more for anything other than to let people know that it’s asynchronous?) education programs on the other hand, teamwork is often integral to the experience and having a solid means of assessing the teamwork can make or break a course or an entire program.

There have been a number of rubrics published over the years that attempt to solve this issue, and they are all good to some degree. But now (and for the past while), Matthew Ohland over at Purdue has been working on CATME, the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness. For faculty looking to try to use teams in their courses, this system, with it’s online evaluation system might be just what is needed to push the idea over the edge and get it rolling.

I’m going to show it to the faculty here, and if there is any feedback, I’ll be sure to post it.