
Team Builder is a tool that was built for the UNSW Faculty of Engineering and has been integrated into UNSW Moodle.
What does Team Builder do?
It assigns students to groups based on their answers to a series of questions that you 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.
When to use
Use Team Builder when you want 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, you can use Team Builder to identify students with each of those qualities and skills, and to build teams containing them all.
Benefits
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 you design.
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 you attempt to construct a Team Builder activity of any complexity.
Getting started
Before you start using Team Builder, decide what qualities will be necessary for students to fill the various roles needed in each group, for the group activity.
Also, if you only want certain students in your course to be selected during this exercise, create a group of them.
Create the questionnaire shell
- On the course home page of the relevant course, click Turn editing on
.
- In the relevant page section click Add an activity or resource, scroll down and select Team Builder from the pop-up activity chooser.
- On the Adding a new Team Builder page:
- Enter a Name for the Team Builder activity that will be meaningful to your students. Note: The word "Questionnaire" is more likely to be meaningful to students than the words "Team Builder".
- Enter an Introduction that describes how the students' answers will be used, e.g. "Your answers to this questionnaire will be used to build the teams for the interviewing activity we discussed in the first lecture and tutorial."
- At Group:
- if you want all students in the course to be included in the built teams, select All students in the drop-down list
- if you only want the students in the selection group you created at step 2 to be included, select that group.
- Complete the Open Date and Close Date fields, remembering that:
- Before the open date and after the close date, the students will not be able to access the questionnaire.
- On or after the open date:
- you will not be able to make changes to the questionnaire, and
- you will not be able to reset the open date.
- If applicable, select the Allow updating of answers check box. This lets the students change their answers to the Team Builder questionnaire up until the time specified in the Close Date.
- Complete any other relevant fields in the remaining sections of the page.
- Click Save and display.
Create questions
For detailed help in formulating questions, watch the video on this moodle.org page "Activity module: Team builder".
- On the Build Teams page, if necessary click the Questionnaire tab.
- On the Questionnaire page, in the Add a new question section, enter the first Question in your Team Builder questionnaire.
-
You can permit students to answer this multiple-choice question in one of 3 different ways. Select the appropriate Answer type from the drop-down list:
- Select one—users can select only one of the answer options.
- Select any (or none)—users can select as many options as are applicable.
- Select one or more—users must select at least one of the choices, but may select more than one if they wish.
-
Enter the first Answer. Press the Enter key or click the plus button
to create extra fields for more answers. Any unused fields will be ignored.
- Check the question and the answer options (you can only delete, not edit, a question once it's added to the questionnaire) and click Add New Question. The question and its answer choices display.
- Repeat steps 2 to 5 until you've entered all the necessary questions.
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To change the order of the questions, click and drag the handle at the left of a question
.
- To delete a question, click Delete at the top right of the question.
- Click Save Questionnaire.
- Click Preview to view the questionnaire as students will see it. As long as it is not after the questionnaire's Open Date, you can return to the Questionnaire page and make changes as needed.
Create team-building predicates/criteria
Wait until the close date has passed before setting these criteria, as you will need to make some decisions based on respondents' answers.
- Log in to Moodle and, on the course home page, click the link for the relevant Team Builder activity.
- (Click the Build Teams tab if necessary.) On the Build Teams page:
-
Select the Number of teams you want to create. Two teams display by default; click the up-arrow
to add more.
- At Prioritise, select whether you want it to be more important to have equal team numbers or students with most criteria met.
- Double-click the team names (Team 1, Team 2 etc.) to enter names that are more meaningful for this activity.
- Click any student's name to see their individual responses to the questionnaire.
-
Now return to the predicate/criterion (the At least one student who answered... box). The first question is selected into the drop-down box; your selection in the with any/all/none of the following drop-down list will depend on how you phrased the question, and which selection type you chose. Ask yourself, What answer do I need here, to identify students with the desired skill or quality?
As you select the answer check boxes, the number of students meeting this criterion will display at the bottom right of the question; if there are too few for one to be placed in each team, you may have to reduce the number of teams or, for a Select any or a Select one or more question, select additional acceptable answer choices for the criterion.
To refine your predicate/criterion, you can add one or more sub-criteria by clicking the crooked arrowat the bottom left of the predicate box.
- When you click Add New Criterion, a second predicate/criterion will display, with the word AND above it. You can click the AND if you wish to toggle it to OR. This flexibility allows you to create quite complex predicates.
- When you have created all the predicates/criteria, click Build Teams. Team Builder will assign students to the teams based on your criteria. At this stage you can still change your predicate selections, the number of teams and the Prioritize selection, to arrange students in a more satisfactory way, clicking Reset Teams to implement your changes.
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There may still be some names in the Unassigned to teams section of the page. You can either:
- click Assign Randomly to have Team Builder divide the unassigned students into the teams, or
- drag each student's name onto one or the other team boxes as desired. Remember that you can view a popup of a student's individual answers by clicking their name.
- When you are satisfied with the selection of students in each group, click Create Groups to save the built teams as Moodle groups.
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Do you want this group of teams to be defined as a grouping?
- If yes, enter a Grouping Name, or select a grouping to which the teams should be added. Select the Prefix Team Names check box if you wish the grouping name to display wherever the team name displays.
- If no, select the Don't assign... check box.
- Click OK. A message, "Your groups were successfully created", displays.
- Return to the course home page. In the Settings block, click Course Administration > Users > Groups. The Groups page displays, including the new groups in the groups list. Click the Groupings tab to see any new grouping you created.
Further assistance
If you experience technical or other issues, consult the Where to get help page.