Supporting Virtual Team Formation through Community-Wide Deliberation

Team-based learning is a structured, small-group learning method that has been associated with many positive outcomes in traditional classroom settings. However, relatively little research has focused on how to form and support teams within online learning platforms, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). A number of challenges arise for team formation in voluntary online classes: students may drop out and leave their team, and even if they do persist with the course, the team may not work together effectively.In this paper, we introduce a team-formation strategy that incorporates a deliberation process, where participants hold discussions in preparation for the collaboration task. First, we present a crowdsourced experiment that compares teams that are formed before or after a community deliberation process. Results demonstrate that teams engaging in a larger community deliberative process prior to team formation exhibit better team performance--as measured by team collaboration product quality--than pre-discussion teams. In a second crowdsourced experiment, we further explore the benefits of community-wide processes by automatically assigning teams based on participants' transactive interaction during deliberation. The results demonstrate advantages in terms of team performance for teams formed based on observed interactions during the community-level deliberation, compared to randomly formed teams. Finally, in a case study, we demonstrate how we successfully adapted the team formation strategy for use in a small MOOC.