Teamwork is seen a key employability skill for our students and group projects are often used to help them develop their ability to work as part of a team.
One challenge is to design a marking scheme that rewards good teamwork so that students value the process as well as the final output. For example, suppose four students have written a report which, by itself, merits a grade of 63%. Should each student be awarded the same grade? What if most of the work was done by two of them?
TeamPoll is an online peer-review system that enables students to provide the other members of their group with feedback on their teamwork. It uses a simple traffic-light analogy to indicate overall performance and also requires the selection of two comments that provide more specific feedback, such as “good attitude” or “better contributions needed”. It should be noted that each student has to rate their own performance as well as that of their team members. The feedback generated can be used in a formative way, to encourage improved performance, and/or summatively to modify the final grade achieved by each student.
View a short video that introduces the TeamPoll system
View a video that shows how a tutor can create, run and view peer-review polls (7mins)
View a video that shows how students use TeamPoll
TeamPoll is currently managed by the School of Engineering Sciences, who developed the system using grants from the University's Learning and Teaching Enhancement Fund. If you would like to use TeamPoll with your students, please contact Dr Kenji Takeda (x24467).
A short case study about this project is available.
The School of Electronics and Computer Science are also developing a peer feedback tool called Peer Pigeon, but it is not ready for general use yet.
The Turnitin plagiarism detection service used by the University also has a peer review tool built into it.
