Design Guidelines for a Team Formation and Analytics Software

Many researchers over the past several decades studied the success factors of a team. Despite much research efforts, there is still no consensus on how a team should ideally be formed. Consequently, how one decides to form teams in a class depends on the domain, classroom context, and pedagogical objectives. Therefore, software used to support an instructor in forming teams must be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of use case scenarios. In this work, we review the general team formation process and summarize our development efforts in building a team formation and analytics software over the past four years. We found two advantages of using learning analytics in our software: (i) to gain the user's trust in the system and (ii) to help the user assess whether the suggested teams are balanced and which modifications should be made if any. Based on our experience, we present design recommendations for developing team formation software that reveals challenges and opportunities, especially in combination with learning analytics.