First of all, I am new to these forums and I hope to become an active member!
I am serving as development manager for a team of senior CS majors tasked with designing an course management tool. This course tool needs to provide a lot of team-management features and ideally what we would like to do is extend moodle to provide these additional features. Some of the more prominent requested features are:
- mutually selectable teams
- random team assignments to unteamed students
- assignments submittable as individual OR as a team
- integrated shared workspaces, team message board, CVS, etc.
- peer evaluations
- assign a grade to a team, instead of individuals
I looked around the developer documentation and the forums and I haven't really found any mention of team management tools in moodle. We are still in the process of getting our own copy of moodle up and running to explore.
The problem is that I don't know where to start with this. I am wondering if this would best be added as activity modules or as a new course format (which seems like the more logical, but more difficult choice). Does anyone have any suggestions/advice on how to best approach this? Any help is much appreciated.
I was also working on
the definition of a team. I think is a very important feature but that
is difficult to develop as a different module as in my opinion should
be highly integrated with many other modules (user identification,
login, tasks, grading, workshop...) It could be implemented as an extra student and let the chron distribute the results... but I don't think is the best way.
That is my point of view of the features:
What is a team?
A Team is a set of students who work together to achieve a goal. This goal can be a simple task or some activities to be performed during the course.
The members of a team may have different roles inside the team, and they can distribute the workload between them in order to get the results.
A team is not a group?
NO, a group is an administrative division of students: the students of a course are divided in groups and a tutor is assigned to each group, but each student acts as an individual to do its homework, quizzes
Team functionalities:
The team is a temporal union of students and is only set for some activities, but during a course a student can be in different teams for different tasks. A team_division is then a distribution of the students in a classroom in order to perform a tem_task
A team_task is a set of activities to be performed by a team_division
Submitting tasks: its done only once by one of the teams members for all the team
Grading. Teacher grades only once the team but the grade is for all the students.
Inside a team, grades can be the same for all the students or can be distributed using some weights that indicate how much did each student work on the team. This weights can be set by the teacher or by the team members themselves.
Different teams should be able to have and share different
materials between them.
A team acts as a simple student inside most of the activities (tasks, worshop, queries), but knowing that is made of different members!!!
I think this is on the right track and quite needed feature. it seems to be a recurring issue of people trying to use groups as teams and getting nowhere. We bumped into this as well.
May be your concept should include section as discussed a while ago
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=11911&parent=57660
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=11911&parent=57660