Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to EdTech examine, a series about educational technology and what you need to know. I'm Chris Hans.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: And I'm Eric Christiansen.
This is episode four ITP metrics, an interview with Dr. Tom O', Neill, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Again, thank you Tom, just for joining us today. So today we have for our interview is Tom o', Neill, Associate professor of Psychology at the University of Calgary. So we'll just start it off with Tom, if you can just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
[00:00:53] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. So I'm actually the director of the Industrial Organizational Psychology Program. We're within the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Calgary.
We've got about 20 graduate students any given year and they're being trained in applying psychological principles to improve the efficiency of the workplace, the effectiveness of the workplace, people's experiences, their satisfaction, their well being, engage employees more and just make work more enriching. And within that, I'm one faculty member of five and I have a research lab called the Individual and Team Performance Lab.
And our goal is to influence as many people as possible by translating as well as creating leading scientific knowledge and then translating that into something that end users can benefit from. And I've had a lot of funding to support that model and you know, that's government money that is being used to create ideally a difference in the world. And we're trying to make our difference through helping people be better team players, helping leaders better understand how to lead team, helping students to develop better teamwork skills to help them in their career and helping students have a better teamwork experience so that you know, they can learn more while they're here at the university.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Yeah, no, for sure. And I think specifically what I wanted to touch on was your tool that you've developed the ITP metrics and I mean I've had now experience using it in my Global challenges course, the Univ 201 where Kyla Flanagan, she was our course coordinator and she used that and I just recently used it for my Economics for Business course as well. Just to put teams together, manage the expectations and put a weighting of the the score as well for that as well. So maybe if you can just tell us a little bit more be behind the history of creating ITP metrics and the platform.
[00:03:10] Speaker C: I'm glad you asked about the history of ITP metrics because I don't often have a chance to talk about that. Normally we're just talking about the specific functional features for a given course needs. But it's a fascinating story, at least in my career.
I was second year Prof. I was pre tenure law of pressure to publish or perish. If you don't publish enough, you're out.
I had been working with engineering design student teams for probably six or seven years up to that point at University of Western Ontario where I did my graduate work.
I did my master's thesis on personality in engineering design student teams, the role of personality, and then my dissertation on conflict and conflict management.
And so these teams really needed a lot of help and they have accreditation requirements for developing those kinds of soft skills.
When I got to U of C, I reached out to someone named Bill Rosehart who was head of electrical engineering at the time and lo and behold went on to become dean and still is dean. And he's a huge supporter of developing teamwork and leadership and other soft skills in addition to the technical skills that they do a great job of. So we're working with 800 first year students a year and my job was to come in and make those teams as effective as possible. Teams of four, they design and build all kinds of neat, fun things, but so many of them struggle because, you know, this is a totally new environment coming into university and now you're working with, you know, total strangers who have very different backgrounds than you potentially.
And you have some, you know, people have different motives and different expectations. They're really struggling with their team satisfaction levels in the course.
And one of the interventions that I decided was we needed a way to scale some kind of feedback on how things are going in the team, the team's health, individual contributions to the team. We needed a way to scale feedback to the students on that or else there's not really any good way to learn. My previous model was we would produce a report for the instructor sometime after the course completed and then they could use that report to inform their future design of the course. But I always felt bad because the student who's completing the survey is not really getting anything from doing that. And it just didn't seem right. I felt that they needed and deserved to get feedback in the moment. And I met a software developer.
We created a bare bones round robin peer feedback and evaluation instrument.
It produced automated one page feedback report for the student. Very bare bones. We had a login page at ITP Metro where all of our stuff is now that was username and password and just white.
There was nothing, it didn't say anything. There wasn't even our logo. We had no logo. We were nothing and the students in, we actually piloted it in a second year engineering electrical course.
And when, you know, the survey link invitation went out in the middle of the semester so students could give each other feedback and then hopefully correct and improve.
I could just see those, those assessments being completed and as I saw them being completed and then I could see the teams, as soon as everyone in the team completes it, they all receive their report automatically within the dashboard. I was like, this is what I'm doing for the rest of my career. This is going to be my focal point.
And it has been. And since then we've grown it so much into five different assessment options. We're looking at other assessment options to add. We've got over 250,000 assessments taken, over 100,000 users. We're global. I've been all over the world to talk about this at conferences, but also invited to train instructors at different colleges and universities and polytechnics.
And look, it's been the best thing that ever happened to me. It's been an absolute blast.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think I really appreciate how you're talking about, you know, it does take quite a bit of time for the students to go and actually input all that information.
I would say at least like half an hour and possibly more. And you know, when you get that real time feedback with those reports and see where you're at and some of the kind of even personal reflections that you can go and take away from that. So, yeah, that's good to hear.
You know, with regards to the actual ITP metrics, like as I mentioned, I've used it now to put my students into groups and facilitate their team dynamics.
Maybe if you can now explain a little bit of the functionality and the ITP Metrics platform and some of the best practices of you from your research.
[00:08:29] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. ITP Metrics has all kinds of different ways to give assessments and feedback to student teams and industry teams for that matter, if you want to. And probably the most important thing to know is that it's 100% free and there's no permissions required whatsoever. I don't, you know, monitor who comes up. You don't submit an application, you don't need certain credentials. We've designed it to be as simple as possible and as accessible as possible.
And the second most important thing is that it's backed by research. And so that means I've drawn on what we know in the scientific literature and my own work. And in fact, more publications are coming out now based on i2Pmetrics that further informs the development and creates robustness around the entire platform. So it's backed by research. That's really key.
And if you click on the assessments page, you will see the primary functions, essentially five different assessments that you can leverage to help your students perform better in teams. And so the first one is peer feedback. I already kind of spoke about that. The round robin feedback where students will rate each other on five competencies known to be important for team effectiveness universally as well as they can write each other feedback.
And that's the most popular because it gives individuals concrete feedback from their team members.
The second most popular one is the team health care model. What we call it stands for communicate, adapt, relate and educate.
And that provides feedback to the health of the team as a whole.
So there will be a common report for all team members and it will tell you how well members feel the team is communicating, adapting, building relationships and educating each other and learning effectively.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: Yeah, and actually, you know that the team health side of things, like in both of the courses that I've used it now I usually use that team health component kind of midway through the course. And then it just gives everybody a chance to figure out where they're at and, you know, adapt and make some, I guess, course corrections. And then I actually have them go and provide like a team health kind of check report where they can go and, you know, advise what they're going to be changing if they need to, reflecting on that, the actual data that they put in.
[00:11:24] Speaker C: That is definitely the best way to use i2Pmetrics. The best thing you can do is give students formative so non evaluative feedback at least once before the end of the course where at that time you might decide to make it evaluative and summative feedback where it has something to do with their grades or you might not. It really depends on the structure of the team project and the course itself. But certainly using it midway through as an opportunity for feedback and just for them to even learn some vocabulary around what team effectiveness is. Because I think the average person just understands conceptually what teamwork is and probably believes that they are a good team member. But the fact of the matter is there's a bell distribution.
Some people are very, very good at it. Most people are sort of average and some people are not good team members at all.
And so.
But almost all of those people benefit from some kind of feedback and development around their teamwork skills. Should I talk briefly about the other functionalities?
[00:12:37] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:12:40] Speaker C: There's a couple of great icebreaker type activities within the conflict management styles assessment and the personality assessment.
So students will receive feedback either on their five conflict management styles or the five factors of personality.
The reports will talk about how this style will influence your ability to build relationships with your team members.
And then that can be very helpful in early stages of team development when you want to accelerate the process of getting to know each other because you have something to talk about, basically give. And then the other thing is everyone loves doing them because you're getting a really fancy piece of feedback about who you are. And we're all fascinated to learn more about who we are. And this kind of does the heavy lifting for you. So those are great. And the last one's the leadership, the set leadership report, which is a self rating. And then you actually nominate peers.
They could be your team members, but it could be just for your own leader development. People who have worked with you in the past, they can come in and provide ratings and then it will compare yourself ratings against your peer ratings of your different leadership styles. And that can be very useful for development as well. So it really covers the gamut from individual effectiveness and teams as a whole, and then leadership.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: You know, Tom, when you. With regards to the ITP metrics, like the first time I used it, Kyla actually set up the teams and the second time I actually went and, you know, uploaded the class list and did it myself. And I noticed that there wasn't very many like kind of variables to help maybe put together, like the best, maybe diverse or interdisciplinary kind of team.
Is that something that's in the works in the future
[00:14:42] Speaker C: when. So Another feature of i2Pmetrics is that we have the entire dashboard.
And the dashboard, interestingly, I think this is the only assessment platform like this. It looks the same whether you're a end user or whether you're an instructor, because everyone has the power to create their own teams and their own assessments.
Which has a downstream positive effect of if I'm a student in a student group or I'm a leader in a student group, I can now run an assessment. Because I became familiar with ITP metrics through a class, I can now run my own assessment with any of my other teams going forward.
So that's been a nice side product. And I think the dashboard, the design of it really facilitates that. It also facilitates if I'm a TA or I'm an instructor, I can scroll through and see at a high level which teams and even which particular individuals are struggling the most. And then I can actually go and bring in some kind of customized approach to dealing with that. It might be that student needs some kind of accommodation. It might be that student needs some extra training. It might be that we need to look at reforming some of those teams that are really struggling. At a minimum, I know who to talk to and who's fine. And that's extremely helpful as an instructor.
So in addition to the dashboard, we have the team designer and the team designer actually falls appears at the bottom of the dashboard.
Oftentimes people don't see it and it's only a small group of people who use it. But you can design your teams to be heterogeneous or homogeneous on different attributes and the algorithm will come up with the an optimized function, an optimized distribution of team members in terms of team formation.
So the popular attributes that people use on there are gender. So they want gender diversity in their teams.
The second most popular one is introversion Extroversion, they want diversity on that variable.
And then the third one is a scheduling option which is the students can upload their schedules and it will try to align their schedule so they have the most out of class overlap and therefore it's easier for them to schedule team meetings. So we do have a team designer. That way you can also add your own attributes that you want it to sort out.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Tom, I had a question about examples of where this has been used perhaps in other kinds of cohort programs and then kind of thinking beyond even higher education. So you mentioned that this came out of looking at engineering, which now that you mention it, kind of makes sense because they moved through their program in a very cohort model. But I'm now reflecting back to library sciences which is very similar. Could you touch on, since you've spoken about this so widely all over the world, some of the other non engineering programs that have used this to great success and perhaps maybe touch on how this could be used or has been used for team building even outside of education.
[00:18:01] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, the first two quote unquote partners because I don't have a formal partnership model. But the people who really worked with me closely and adopted it was the Telfer School of Management at University of Ottawa and then Royal Rhodes University.
And it's interesting because they both have different models. And so the one at Telfer was really cool because they committed their associate Dean of Teaching and learning committed to building teamwork in their courses.
And so if you were an instructor that wanted to run teams, they had a template to add to your course outline about how you will actually be required to implement I2Pmetrics and you know, I had been there several times to help make sure they understood how this would work. And this isn't just about getting people to use ITV metrics for the sake of it, it's about creating value for the students and the instructors. For the instructors you have fewer teams running into problems where you have to intervene and for students, I mean it should be self explanatory. You're getting feedback about yourself, you're getting feedback about your team and you're getting an opportunity to make adjustments based on an evidence backed platform and it's 100% free and you can go on to use it for whatever you want in the future. So it's as good as or better than anything you can buy.
So you know it's a win win.
Yeah. So they did a top down sort of institutional approach at Royal Rhodes University they have a group of team coaches because the individual instructors effectively outsource the team development in their courses. So if I, if I'm running teams I don't have to worry about managing the team processes and team effectiveness and team training. There's a set of coaches that come in and do that and so they're more like internal consultants.
And that model has been very, very, very successful as well. I've been out there, you know, once a year for three or four years. I was going and you know, basically have a way to scale the training. I can have 50 instructors in the room for half a day and they can leave equipped to deploy, you know, all of it metrics.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: So it's interesting that you do training that sounds like a very, a great overview. If you can do training with instructors beforehand for somebody who can't do training and wants to just dip their toe into ITP metrics. And I think you touched on this a little bit with the question that Chris asked. But what's the. If you were to recommend to a new instructor, I can see right away, especially colleagues and say at Mount Royal's health and Physical education program does a lot of work, they're interested in team building. It's a very kind of team building kind of profession.
Depending on the major, what would be the first, perhaps easiest step that you'd recommend to an instructor if they wanted to dip into this with very, very little knowledge?
[00:21:12] Speaker C: It's a great question. I think if you wanted to dip your toes into ITP metrics and team development more generally, the most important thing you can do is give the students something around the midpoint of the semester and some kind of milestone in the team project where it makes sense for them to stop, take a breath, reflect on the work that they've already done, receive some feedback on those team dynamics and individual capabilities, and if you can, have them at least reflect on an action plan for what should be changed. If not, submit some kind of reflection just to make sure that they actually do go through the process of talking about how things are going to. For some reason, this doesn't come naturally to people, and it's hard for me to relate since I've been doing this for so long. But people don't often want to talk about how they work together. They just want to talk about the task. And the best teams, you know, do both, obviously. So I think if I was going to start and I just wanted to dip my toes in, I would run the peer evaluation, or what we call the peer feedback assessment. I'd run it around the midpoint of the course, would give students a very small amount of credit on a completion basis, maybe 1%, 2%. We've had great success. It's a free percent or two in the course for them. And that way, all of the students give and receive feedback because giving feedback can be as valuable as receiving feedback. That's a skill as well. They have to learn to develop.
And frankly, that's all you have to do. If you wanted to, you could. You could reassess at the end of the semester. I like telling students, we're going to reassess you whether it's evaluative or not, because it means you have a chance to see how much you improved and you'll have a common benchmark for doing that. So that's where I would start. And from there, I think when that goes well, you. You build up, you add the care model. So at the midpoint, they're not just getting individual feedback. They're also getting feedback on the overall team's health.
And they can follow the exact same reflections. You know, it's just two reports instead of one.
And then from there you can, you know, layer in an icebreaker, which is the personality assessment or the conflict management styles. One, you. You run that right when you form the teams, and that engages them in sharing some personal information. You know, the sky's the limit.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: I have another question that's kind of a. If you don't mind, that's kind of a curveball based on what you said. Because one of the things that I've observed that one of the anxieties that comes up where at my institution, when I talk to Students is that there seems to be, even among the best students, there seems to be a big gap between the competency the student in their studies and how confident they are to be able to talk to a potential employer about the soft skills that they've learned. And I find ITP metrics fascinating because a lot of the skills that it highlights or brings to the surface are ones are soft skills that we know from research. And RBC has done all sorts of research around what are the top skills that employers look for. And so to understand yourself makes you a much more effective, say, interview candidate from the most practical level.
I'd love it. I don't really know how you'd answer this, but I would love it if you could talk about if the potential for this or if you've done any research around students maybe bringing in this knowledge that they've learned about themselves. To talk to an employer to have really evidence about. Here's how I work with the team, here's my personality. I think there's a.
It seems incredibly timely given what's going on right now, the state of the economy. And it really trains people, like you said, to reflect on who they are. But that makes them a much better team player, better communicator, things like that, if that makes sense.
[00:25:09] Speaker C: No, I've always saw one of the big strengths of ITP metrics and advantages for the student is that it's effectively logging your progress on, you know, self development, self understanding how your personality maybe has evolved, you know, and then how your team experiences have improved over the course of multiple exposures to feedback those skills in undergrad. And so you effectively have a dossier sitting right there. And you know, you can draw, you know, you get, you get raw metrics, you get actual numbers in terms of the feedback. So you could show, hey, in my first year, you know, I was, I was an average performer on, you know, skills like communicating with other people or having high standards.
And you know, you can see over time I can show a trajectory where I've gotten better and better. And so I'm, you know, that demonstrates my learning orientation, my commitment.
You know, here's where I'm at now. And I think that I can offer something to your organization.
X, Y and Z. And you've got the vocabulary in those reports is the same vocabulary that the employers are looking for.
So you're perfectly positioned to just, you know, take that evidence that you have, put it into your own little pitch, which is where your personal, you know, artistic experiences and skills come into play. And I Just think it's an incredibly valuable tool for that exact reason and
[00:26:39] Speaker B: probably is a great incentive when you're telling or asking students to spend time on this because you can say, not only do you get a grade percentage, but here is something that you can leave with and your project will probably go better. You kind of have a perfect trifecta.
[00:26:52] Speaker C: I think so. You know, when I go in at the undergraduate level at the first year, the students are often kind of confused as to why I'm there. I do a lot of, you know, guest appearances and things like that to help the instructors through who are using it for the first time. And I'll put that offer out there. I'll help anybody anytime they get this up in their course. It's my number one priority. I don't make any money out of it. I get a lot of intrinsic satisfaction from doing it. It just makes me feel good and like I'm making some kind of contribution to the world based on my technical background. Those, those students that say first year level often don't appreciate what it's like to be in a bad team. When I go in second, third, especially fourth year, you know, as they're about to go out into industry, it's like I just say, I am here because we all know the pain of working in a bad team and we want to, you know, make our team as effective as we possibly can. And I've built a suite of tools for you to benefit from if you so choose.
And I'll do everything I can to make sure that you're going to be successful and you're going to have a good experience.
And I get a lot of head nods.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: So, Tom, like, as a student, if I've done the personality assessment once and I take a course that is using ITP metrics, can I go and basically import that in the assessment the next
[00:28:18] Speaker C: time as the instructor?
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, I mean, let's say, for example, if I took this one course now in the spring, and then now in the fall, there's another instructor that's using ITP metrics and they decide or they ask, well, you've already done the personality assessment and instead of spending that half an hour, can I just import that in.
[00:28:40] Speaker C: Certainly the student has it, you know, forever, and so they can access it for their own development. And I guess what I have to maybe we can talk offline about, because it's really a question, is for you as an instructor, let's say you're giving them completion grades. You need to know who's done it and who hasn't. Right. And if they haven't done it, you need to know if they've done it elsewhere and they're just using that one that you can't see.
And honestly I'm actually not sure. I'd have to check the functionality there.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Yeah, no worries. I mean, I was just thinking, imagine if you actually had this implemented throughout and then now you, instead of spending that half an hour or 45 minutes doing that personality assessment and now that's it, you know, it's a one time investment and you just.
[00:29:25] Speaker C: Yeah, they don't have to redo it. I mean they'll always have it. The question would just be a logistical one of, for the instructor in case you needed to verify if it was done. We need a, we need a process, an automated process for that.
And I. Frank, I know we've discussed it and I just can't remember where things landed. I love to check into that.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean one thing that I really like as an instructor, especially for the peer feedback, is it already automatically totals everything up. And so then you just take that number and input it in for the grades.
So that's a time saver for sure.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: Yes. There's an adjustment factor we provide that you can use as a multiplier or a multiplicative function of the team's grade. And what it is, is effectively, if I've contributed exactly the same amount as my peers, it's a 1 over 1 and so the multiplier is 1.0. My grade ends up being the same as the team grade.
If my team members view me as contributing 0.8, then you know, I get 80% of the team grade, so a little bit less. And if I get more, I get maybe 1.2. Right. So there's a multiplier function there. And every instructor uses these things a little differently. I'm not saying that's the one way to do it, it's just one way that a lot of people like to do it. But a really, really important thing to keep in mind for instructors is that the more you can design some form of both individual and team accountability into the course, the better.
Students do not like when the social loafers get off and have get the exact same outcome as the people who put in all the work. And a lot of people say, well, teamworks inherently there's always going to be this problem. And that's a hundred percent true. But it's not really a problem when you recognize that a, in teamwork we never all put in the Exact same amount of effort we put in, the effort that's needed in accordance with our role, which should have been decided on through open discussions and ongoing discussions over the semester. And we deliver on our role. And, you know, sometimes some people have situations going on in their lives where they can't do as much, but they may communicate that to their team members. The team members might say, hey, if you can just do this stuff, you know, that's fine, and we'll view your contribution as satisfied and there's no problem. And they're actually going to get the same.
They're going to get the same outcome, and that's fine. But it's when there's no way to hold those people accountable, who never come to meetings, who are always late with their work, whose work is not very good and has to be redone by others in the team, those people need to be held accountable. And the best way to do it, in my opinion, is to have an evaluative peer feedback rating given at the end of the semester and then either use that to weight their final teamwork grade in the course or even say, look, 5% of this course is dedicated to what your peers say you did.
And I have very good evidence that on aggregate, that creates more accountability and that creates healthier teams and that creates more learning from the course. And so, of course, some people will say, well, what about people ganging up on each other and gaming the system? I mean, I guess, what are our options? In my mind, on aggregate, it's clearly the best option.
And if you're transparent about how those grades are assigned from the beginning. So you don't, you don't decide on this November, when the course project is due in December, you decide on this in the summertime, and you tell the students up front and you put it in the course outline, and then you give them formative feedback at the midpoint, like we discussed before, where they just get informal feedback so that, hey, look, if they are falling a bit behind, this is just friendly feedback. And later it's going to be for grades. So you have the opportunity to get this feedback. Now talk to your team members about what you need to maybe be doing better and earn that grade. And at the end of the day, almost all of us work in teams in our careers.
So, I mean, if you're going to game the system when you're an undergrad, you're going to game the system when you're, when you're in your career, like, you've got to learn to work in this environment. And it's not, you're not, it's not always going to go well. There's going to be times you're working with people who you just don't like working with and that's just real life. And no intervention can fix that completely.
But there are things we can do to help.
There are things we've shown at large scale on aggregate help. But I've never seen a course, a big course with 100% healthy teams. It's just, it just usually doesn't happen that way. But we can go for example from. I took engineering intro to engineering here, 800 student course from 43% healthy teams to 71% healthy teams. We're always in between 70 and 80% now, haven't been able to get it higher.
And there are structural reasons why there's just limits to what we can fit in the course with respect to team training and team development and feedback opportunities because there's technical material to cover as well. But those are the trade offs. Right. In my, in the course that I run, I run a small capstone undergraduate course, there will usually only be four or five teams. And my teams are always outstanding because I make them go through every single assessment on IT metrics and I bring in team training principals and I design my project with multiple milestones and check ins. With me personally, it's a small course, I can do that. It's different in other types of courses. But yeah, it's, it's, you know, we'll never have perfect teams, but we can strive for that.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: I mean, another incentive that gives to students. Tom, is that the way you've explained it? I love. Because it's kind of. It takes the guesswork out of finding those people that you're more likely to work with. I mean anybody who's gone to grad school, you tend to. If there's a lot of group work in a professional program, I think law is like that you're going to gravitate towards those people where this kind of gives you that edge to find them. I mean it's almost like not a social network but, but kind of the metrics that you might get from it, so to speak.
[00:36:21] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: Tom, I had a question about the current situation with COVID and switching to online.
This was clearly probably designed, I'm assuming with more of a face to face in mind. And I'm not suggesting at all that it doesn't translate to online. But in terms of your advice to instructors with regard to matching up teams in an online environment, perhaps using itp metrics or not. Is there anything that you would suggest
[00:36:50] Speaker C: purely on matching teams or the overall teamwork in an online course?
[00:36:55] Speaker B: I would think that's probably both, but maybe we start with matching teams and then perhaps maybe more broadly a communication piece.
[00:37:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: And
[00:37:06] Speaker C: I direct people to a white paper that I'm going to be releasing in the next couple days on this exact topic. Overall, how to design your course to support teamwork. And what are the principles that we know that help teams be more effective? Not just IXP metrics, but team contracts, you know, team meeting trackers. I have one of those in there.
Other resources that teams can look at and consider implementing team formation is where it starts. The way I like to communicate to people about these things is a lifespan model. So what should you do at the beginning and team formation? The literature on team formation, and this is my opinion, is not consistent in telling us exactly how to organize and compose people onto teams so that the teams will have the best chance of being successful.
And part of the reason is because it so much depends on the task demands. Okay, so how big is this project? How complex is this project?
How much learning will have to happen to support this project? When is that learning done, and when are you making that more technical information available to them with respect to when they need it in the team project?
And how many people are in this class? Is it a thousand or is it 100?
And what is the discipline? And, you know, so it's effectively researchers have tried to figure out what are the perfect personality traits or what are the perfect attributes or, you know, cognitive styles, everything, you name it. It's a vast literature. I sort of gave up on it because there is no one universal sort of truth or one universal way to compose your teams.
So that leaves us with, you know, thinking about it from other points of view, what do we want students to get out of this? Do we want students to be exposed to perspectives that might be different from theirs? Well, if I'm in engineering, maybe then I can ask, you know, students to pair up in such a way that there's, you know, someone who's interested in mechanical engineering, someone interested in electrical, and someone interested in software. Right. Or, you know, there's a really cool program called Redevelop in Science at University of Calgary, and it's a graduate program. They have four or five teams per year, and they have, you know, computer science experts, they have engineering experts, and then they have essentially policy experts because they're trying to come up with ways of creating renewable energy solutions that could actually be implemented for actual organizations. It's community based learning in multidisciplinary teams. So I need to make sure that then I have people coming into these teams who can fill the roles that they're going to be expected to fulfill and so forth.
So, long story short, there's, in my opinion, I don't see any evidence for a universal truth on this matter as of now. And I'm not sure that there would. There is one.
But what I think instructors can do is use something like the team designer, where you can ask people a few probing questions ahead of time that you think would be important to know in terms of assigning people to teams and then creating, trying to as much as possible, to create complementary styles where someone who has a strength in one area accommodates a weakness for someone in another area.
If it's a thousand people, you may not have that ability to. The algorithm will do its best based on what you tell it. And if you want your students to work with people of different ethnic backgrounds or just different genders, you can do that because that's an important experience you want them to get as part of this course. Whether or not that'll make them a better team isn't clear.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: Well, and I think even, you know, you mentioned, Eric, about like the online side of things. I mean, typically when I've taught online, normally I just go and put them randomly into groups. And so if we can go and do it in a way where now they've done their personality assessment, they can put in whether they're extroverted or introverted, their gender, you add a few more other type of like, variables, and maybe you could get a diverse team. Because the alternative is basically they're just going to be randomly put into teams.
[00:41:57] Speaker C: The mindset that we, I think, want to create students who are used to working in a diverse environment and understand how to interact with people of different backgrounds and perspectives.
I think that we have a social responsibility to give students those opportunities and start them off on the right foot with building skills to deal with those situations. Because at surface level, it sounds pretty easy to do.
But the reality is diverse teams actually tend to struggle a bit more than homogeneous teams. Because if we all kind of look at things the same way, you know, we can kind of move ahead pretty smoothly now. We might be more prone to overlooking really valuable information though, and perspectives. So we might be walking into a pitfall that essentially because of our assumptions, our common assumptions, we have no clue that it's coming.
And it also, you know, we're not likely to be exposed to different views. And when you're exposed to different views, if you are mature and trained, you should be using that as an opportunity to learn because probably that other person is just as smart or smarter than you. So why do they see it differently? And that creates, hopefully intellectual curiosity and learning. It doesn't mean you have to change your view, but these are skills that are increasingly critical in this world where a lot of routine activity is being automated. It's going to be the leadership and softer skills where humans outperform machines and artificial intelligence.
That's going to take a lot longer for artificial intelligence to communicate well, to, you know, be sensitive to people's different, you know, personal situations and struggles and, you know, just navigating the complexity of humankind. It's all about the soft skills.
But we have to recognize that students will probably struggle at first.
And you have to decide as an instructor, you know, how much of a struggle is reasonable and am I giving them the tools and do I even have the tools because to teach them or do I have to outsource that somehow? And I think that that's a place where you need deans to get involved, if not higher levels to make the resources available.
[00:44:37] Speaker A: I think a lot of times people, they underestimate. I always say the most powerful computer in the world is the human brain. And a lot of times we quite often don't take into account the human element. And you know, for example, if, if I see a picture of Tom as a human being or as, you know, a picture of Eric, I can say definitively with a high degree of certainty that, yeah, this is Eric and this is Tom, but a computer is going to maybe be able to do it with, I don't know, a percentage of 70%. And it's all a matter of the number, the amount of data that it's collecting and the more data that it has, the more processing power that they allocate. I mean, it's going to take time, right?
[00:45:24] Speaker B: Okay, I think it's time to move on to the rapid fire questions. So these are quick technology or personal preference questions that we're asking all our interviewers. We may add or change some of these questions up, but for the time being, we have three rapid fire questions. So, Tom, are you ready?
[00:45:44] Speaker C: I'm ready.
[00:45:45] Speaker B: Okay. First question is Mac or PC?
[00:45:49] Speaker C: Mac all the way.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: IPhone or Android?
[00:45:53] Speaker C: That's a tough one. I'm at the iPhone stage now in
[00:45:57] Speaker B: my life, but wavering maybe. Ready to switch?
[00:46:00] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:46:02] Speaker B: And the last question is standing or
[00:46:04] Speaker C: sitting desk, it's got to be standing.
Health comes first.
[00:46:10] Speaker B: And just because we talked a little bit about this on the podcast, work setups, ergonomics. Because people are having to recreate a home office, is there anything about sitting or standing that you tips do you give? Do you switch between the two? Do you stand?
[00:46:22] Speaker C: Most of the day I switch between the two.
I also switch my work environment as much as possible. Obviously Covid limited that, but I think working out of coffee shops, sometimes I will sit on the couch and work.
Sometimes I am sitting like I am now in my office at my desk. I also have a cabinet at my desk that is the absolute perfect height. And then I love doing walk and talk meetings. So whenever you can, even during COVID you can do that on the phone. So if you don't need to be typing up detailed notes at the time, it's very, very healthy and invigorating alternative.
[00:47:01] Speaker B: That is awesome advice.
[00:47:03] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: Is there anything in particular that we haven't asked about ITP Metrics or some of the research they're doing that you'd like to highlight?
[00:47:12] Speaker C: I think we've covered enough for this episode. I mean, I published a fair amount of training paradigms and things like that. But what I'll just say is, you know, I'm more than happy to help anyone who has a passion for creating more effective teams in their classroom. And again, I don't. That's not for a personal agenda.
It's not because I'm going to get anything tangible out of it, but it's because, you know, I do have some knowledge about this and I just really, really love sharing it. And that's why I created i2Pmetrics. So if anybody wants to reach out to me at any time, they should not hesitate to just do a cold reach out and someone from my staff. I have 15 people, you know, with my graduate students and myself.
One of us will work with you and do the best we can to make sure that you are equipped to build high performance teamwork in your classroom.
[00:48:15] Speaker B: Well, I can definitely think of a few people that I can pass on and hold departments, so I think that will be very valuable.
[00:48:22] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: Well, Tom, I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to be interviewed for this podcast. I find this to be a fascinating platform. The work you're doing is awesome and I'm just so impressed by how applicable it is to so many different disciplines, industries and such like that. So thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
[00:48:42] Speaker C: Thanks for having me. It's been fun.
[00:48:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Thanks, Tom.
[00:48:47] Speaker B: For more information about EdTech examined, visit edtechexamined.com if you have tech questions you'd like us to answer, you can reach us at our email heydtechexamined.com youm can also find us on Twitter techexamined.
Tag your posts with the hashtag edtechofficehours, and we might feature your question on a future episode. Until next time, Sam.
