Groups / Teams
Teams (or groups) are a core feature in LAMS that allow you to structure collaborative learning within a lesson. You can use them to organise students into smaller working units.
What are Teams in LAMS?
Teams divide your class into smaller groups of students who work together on specific activities. These groups can collaborate on tasks, submit collective responses and engage in structured discussions, collaboration and peer learning.
When students are placed in teams within an activity, they can only see and interact with members of their own team. As the teacher, you can view and interact with all teams.
Creating Teams
You can allocate students into teams in different ways:
Manually (choose in Monitor)
By selecting the "Choose in Monitor" option, you allow teams to be set up later after you create the lesson. Once the lesson is created in the course, you can allocate students into teams through the Monitor.
Options:
Number of groups/team: while you can change this once you create the lesson, it might be handy for you to set the number of teams that you expect to have while authoring your lesson plan.
Silent grouping: Students will be team without delay and seamlessly moved to the next activity.
By default, when students reach the Teams activity and silent grouping is not selected, they can see their team and the names of the other students in their team.
Name groups: You can pre-set the name of each team.
Randomly
By selecting the "Random" option, LAMS will automatically assign students to teams as they reach the Teams activity. This allocation is done using a round-robin method to ensure an even distribution across teams.
Note that only students who reach the Teams activity will be allocated to teams. This ensures that absent students are not assigned, and only those present in the lesson are included in teams.
Options:
Number of groups/team: while you can change this once you create the lesson, it might be handy for you to set the number of teams that you expect to have while authoring your lesson plan.
Students per group/team: Set the maximum number of students per team. Once this limit is reached, LAMS will automatically create a new team, ensuring an even distribution of students across all teams.
Silent grouping: Students will be team without delay and seamlessly moved to the next activity.
Name groups: You can pre-set the name of each team (only if the Number of groups option is set).
Student's Choice
By selecting the "Student's choice" option, when students reach the Teams activity, they will be able to select which team they want to join.
If you have selected "Number of groups/teams", then they will be able to join the teams you have pre-created. Note that you can add more if you need from Monitor.
Options:
Equal group sizes: If you enable this option, you ensure that teams remain balanced, so there are no uneven numbers across teams.
View students before selection: If you enable this option, students can see the names of other team members before choosing which team to join.
Name groups: You can pre-set the name of each team (only if the Number of groups option is set).
Setting which activities use Teams
Once you have created teams, you can use them within any following activities to set which activities are meant to be used with teams.
Just select which activity you want to apply the Teams and select the grouping.
You can have multiple Teams activities within a lesson.
FAQs
How many students can I add to a team?
There's no limit. However, you should keep the team size managable to engage collaboration and discussion.
For instances, if you are running a TBL lesson, the typically recommended size is 4 to 6 students. For Problem Based Learning, up to 12 team members is advisable.
Can I save my teams' configuration and reuse them in later lessons?
Of course! You can save your teams and then just reuse the teams' configuration in any future lesson.
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