Athena
What the slack!
Propaedeutic students from Communication and Multimedia Design (CMD) are struggling to find good team dynamics and teachers don’t always have proper insight into these dynamics.
“Slacking” students are hard to identify in order to support them better in their foundation year.
Challenge
How can an online platform positively stimulate cooperation and participation among propaedeutic students by making individual performance within the project group clear and discussable?
Outcome
Create an open platform where students and teachers can get clear but anonymous insights into team dynamics and performance over the track of their foundation year.
Gain quick insights into your performance
Feedback
Giving- or asking for feedback can be a tough task for propaedeutic students, especially in a new team.
Even though teachers are having weekly meetings with student teams frustrations mostly come at the end of the projects.
Sometimes the feedback comes as late as after receiving the (disappointing) grade of the project.
Teachers insights into feedback
A contract
With Athena, students of a project team are creating a contract at the start of the project with each other. This contract contains all the indicators on which the students will give each other feedback upon.
The indicators are divided into 4 competences;
- Attitude
- Accountability
- Knowledge development
- Functioning within the group
Project coordinators have the ability to define initial indicators that students can choose for their contract. Additionally, Athena enables each team to make their own indicators that they believe the entire team should held accountable for.
All students within a project team give weekly feedback to each other on the agreed upon indicators.
Insights into trello activities
Anonymous
As the purpose of Athena is to give more insight into team dynamics Athena is built to make sure students are giving honest feedback. Therefore, all feedback given within Athena is anonymized for both students and teachers. Athena only shows the outcome of the feedback per student but will never show who gave what feedback.
Performance
Besides feedback as an indicator in team dynamics, performance and division of tasks are sometimes hard to see for project groups and teachers alike.
Some teachers of CMD are using a scrum-like approach with their project teams in order to follow the progress of a project. Athena has the option to connect any project group to a trello board if a teacher would like to.