
Team Projects Toolkit

When students work in teams, they can develop a set of interpersonal skills that will be beneficial in the workplace. And in teams students can create more complex, authentic projects where they engage in higher level thinking skills. Research has also shown that students working in cooperative teams to solve problems outperform individuals competing with each other.
This guide aims to provide Instructors and students with the guidance and tools they'll need to manage team projects. It can be used in conjunction with any of the media toolkits.
Instructors
Team Projects - Assignment Guide
Project Design
Building in Success
- How do I Get Student Buy-in?
- Better Group Work Begins with How the Groups are Formed
- Teaching Teamwork - Tools from MIT
- CATME - Smarter Teamwork - series of online tools -(requires user license fee)
Student Product Options
More Resources
Barkley, E.F. (2014). Collaborative learning techniques: A handbook for college faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Full text available online.
Team Setup
Groups in Cougar Courses
Cougar Courses Collaboration Tools
Once you set up groups in CC, these tools can be set to separate groups, providing each team with their own workspace.
- Set Up a Forum - create groups in CC, then set the forum to separate groups to provide each team with a discussion space
- Chat Activity - for real- time synchronous discussion, chats can be saved for future reference.
- OU Wiki - collaborative editing, similar to Google docs.
- See the student section below for more tools.
Assessing Teams
In addition to evaluating the team's product, you'll also want to gather information on the group's overall effectiveness and the individual team member's contributions.
Multiple examples of self, peer, and group assessment forms on the CMU Eberly Center site.
CATMEs Peer evaluation instruments - word documents
Team Peer evaluation examples from Penn State's Schreyer Institute.
Assessment Tools
Cougar Courses Feedback activity - The Instructional Design team created a peer feedback activity with sample questions. If you'd like us to import it into your course, where you will be able to modify it to your needs, contact IDS with your course name and number to request this.
Cougar Courses Workshop Activity
Teammates: A free online tool for managing student peer evaluations and feedback.
Students
Working in a Team
The Language of Teamwork - phrases to help you express agreement and disagreement, run a meeting, build relationships and motivate.
If your instructor hasn't provided these, use the docs in Team Setup above to assign roles and set some groundrules.
Tools for Success
Design
LucidChart - free online tool for real-time collaboration creating mind maps, flow charts and
other graphic organizers. Watch Video Tutorials
Meeting Online
Zoom webconferencing tool - free for CSUSM students. In the student help guides, Media tools section you'll find guides on installing, using and recording presentations
with zoom
Content/Project Management
Collaborating in Google Drive
Trello - Easily allows you to set up teams, tasks, due dates and assign tasks. Getting started with Trello.
Office 365 free download. Includes the app Planner - similar to Trello.
License
This work by Susan Wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.