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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren

Teamwork analytics for training collaborative problem solving in professional higher education

Alternative title: Læringsanalyse som verktøy i teamlæring og problemløsning i høyere utdanning

Awarded: NOK 12.0 mill.

Project Manager:

Project Number:

324826

Application Type:

Project Period:

2021 - 2026

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Partner countries:

Collaborative problem solving and effective teamwork in education or industry are key for employability and lifelong learning, and preparing graduates for such work is an issue of general concern. Digital technologies and emerging learning analytics techniques have potential to support collaborative problem solving by making teamwork processes more effective and enabling new ways of feedback and guidance of the teams’ learning activities. The TeamLearn project studies how collaborative problem solving can be supported by providing collaborating student teams with automated feedback about their team activities. Student teams from medical interprofessional, nursing and legal education will be studied while they are solving complex problems, for example, a patient diagnosis, a critical intensive care situation or a complex court case. The project uses design-based research to develop and implement a learning analytics dashboard (MAD), which visualizes and provides information about the team activities. The resulting feedback is shared with students and teachers in debriefing sessions and used to develop pedagogical interventions intended to support team learning and guidance. The dashboard generates real-time data on team-based learning activities, such as digital traces of the teams’ communication, actions, positioning, affective states, and makes teamwork traces available for multimodal computational analysis. The project’s outcomes address a growing interest in enabling the development and authentic assessment of 21st-century skills by capturing and using teamwork as real-time input to support learning and better forms of guidance. TeamLearn is a multi-disciplinary project, combining learning research, computer sciences and learning analytics. It includes Norwegian partnerships with the University of South-East Norway (USN), faculties at the University of Oslo (UiO), and collaboration with universities from Australia, USA, Finland and the Netherlands.

Collaborative problem solving and effective teamwork in education or industry are key for employability and lifelong learning. Collocated teamwork, in which participants share the same physical space but use advanced technologies to solve (acute) problems, remains an important practice across domains, despite the online revolution. Educators and leaders in Norway and internationally require research knowledge about how new digital technology and data science techniques can be integrated into and assist in learning and developing collaborative problem solving and teamwork competences. Using design-based interventions, the TeamLearn project will (1) analyse the collaboration and collect perceptions of students and teachers in medical interprofessional, nursing and legal education about collaborative problem solving and teamwork; (2) design, together with teachers, students and developers, a tool which uses digital traces of teamwork to display automated feedback to users; (3) develop, implement and evaluate learning scenarios in which the automated feedback tool is used to assist the improvement of teamwork and collaborative problem solving in professional higher education. TeamLearn is a multidisciplinary project, with national and international partners, which addresses a challenge at the intersection of learning sciences, learning analytics and educational design. It will generate new knowledge and methods for combining multimodal data analytics of verbal, physical, and interactional processes involved in teamwork for use in teaching and learning. The project’s outcomes will be of international academic interest, as they will address growing interest in the authentic assessment and development of 21st-century skills. The project will have an impact on practice, by providing new tools and instruments to support more learning effective teamwork in education and industry.

Funding scheme:

FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren