A digital dashboard for supporting online student teamwork

Abstract

Teamwork skills are crucial to college students, both at university and aferwards. However, few tools exist to monitor student teamwork and to help students develop teamwork skills. We present a tool which collects the interactions of students who are using online platforms to complete a sustained task as a team; conducts a range of analyses of these data; and then presents information about team and team member behaviors in real time on a digital dashboard. This dashboard provides instructors with a user-friendly picture of team and team-member dynamics, which can also be made available, as appropriate, to both teams and team members. While some behaviors have been shown to be (or are self-evidently) beneficial or harmful to team performance, these data and analyses also make possible exploration of whether less obvious behaviors afect team outcomes and performance.