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1. Teaching Team Collaboration in Cybersecurity: A Case Study from the Transactive Memory Systems Perspective

   https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON46332.2021.9453894  

   Yoon, Kay; Chang, Sang-Yoon (April 2021, IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON))

   Recent trends in the cybersecurity workforce have recognized that effective solutions for complex problems require collective efforts from individuals with diverse sets of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Therefore, the growing need to train students in team collaboration skills propelled educators in computer science and engineering to adopt team-based pedagogical strategies. Team-based pedagogy has shown success in enhancing students' knowledge in course subjects and their motivation in learning. However, it is limited in offering concrete frameworks specifically focusing on how to teach team collaboration skills. As part of an interdisciplinary effort, we draw on Transactive Memory Systems Theory-a communication theory that explains how individuals in groups learn who knows what and organize who does what-in developing a Team Knowledge Sharing Assignment as a tool for student teams to structure their team collaboration processes. This paper reports a result of a case study in designing and facilitating the assignment for cybersecurity students enrolled in a scholarship program. Students' evaluations and the instructor's assessment reveal that the assignment made a positive impact on students' team collaboration skills by helping them successfully identify their team members' expertise and capitalize on their team's knowledge resources when delegating functional roles. Based on this case study, we offer practical suggestions on how the assignment could be used for various classes or cybersecurity projects and how instructors could maximize its benefits. 

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2. A Learner-Centered Technique for Collectively Configuring Inputs for an Algorithmic Team Formation Tool

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499331  

   Hastings, Emily M.; Krishna Kumaran, Sneha R.; Karahalios, Karrie; Bailey, Brian P. (January 2022, Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2022))

   The configuration that an instructor enters into an algorithmic team formation tool determines how students are grouped into teams, impacting their learning experiences. One way to decide the configuration is to solicit input from the students. Prior work has investigated the criteria students prefer for team formation, but has not studied how students prioritize the criteria or to what degree students agree with each other. This paper describes a workflow for gathering student preferences for how to weight the criteria entered into a team formation tool, and presents the results of a study in which the workflow was implemented in four semesters of the same project-based design course. In the most recent semester, the workflow was supplemented with an online peer discussion to learn about students' rationale for their selections. Our results show that students want to be grouped with other students who share the same course commitment and compatible schedules the most. Students prioritize demographic attributes next, and then task skills such as programming needed for the project work. We found these outcomes to be consistent in each instance of the course. Instructors can use our results to guide team formation in their own project-based design courses and replicate our workflow to gather student preferences for team formation in any course. 

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3. Privacy-Preserving and Diversity-Aware Trust-based Team Formation in Online Social Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3670411  

   Mahajan, Yash; Cho, Jin-Hee; Chen, Ing-Ray (June 2024, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology)

   As online social networks (OSNs) become more prevalent, a new paradigm for problem-solving through crowd-sourcing has emerged. By leveraging the OSN platforms, users can post a problem to be solved and then form a team to collaborate and solve the problem. A common concern in OSNs is how to form effective collaborative teams, as various tasks are completed through online collaborative networks. A team’s diversity in expertise has received high attention to producing high team performance in developing team formation (TF) algorithms. However, the effect of team diversity on performance under different types of tasks has not been extensively studied. Another important issue is how to balance the need to preserve individuals’ privacy with the need to maximize performance through active collaboration, as these two goals may conflict with each other. This research has not been actively studied in the literature. In this work, we develop a team formation (TF) algorithm in the context of OSNs that can maximize team performance and preserve team members’ privacy under different types of tasks. Our proposedPRivAcy-Diversity-AwareTeamFormation framework, calledPRADA-TF, is based on trust relationships between users in OSNs where trust is measured based on a user’s expertise and privacy preference levels. The PRADA-TF algorithm considers the team members’ domain expertise, privacy preferences, and the team’s expertise diversity in the process of team formation. Our approach employs game-theoretic principlesMechanism Designto motivate self-interested individuals within a team formation context, positioning the mechanism designer as the pivotal team leader responsible for assembling the team. We use two real-world datasets (i.e., Netscience and IMDb) to generate different semi-synthetic datasets for constructing trust networks using a belief model (i.e., Subjective Logic) and identifying trustworthy users as candidate team members. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposedPRADA-TFscheme in four variants against three baseline methods in the literature. Our analysis focuses on three performance metrics for studying OSNs: social welfare, privacy loss, and team diversity. 

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4. Operationalizing team commitment in a project-based learning environment

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962577  

   Jaiswal, Aparajita; Karabiyik, Tugba; Thomas, Paul; Magana, Alejandra J. (October 2022, Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   Commitment is a multi-dimensional construct that has been extensively researched in the context of organizations. Organizational and professional commitment have been positively associated with technical performance, client service, attention to detail, and degree of involvement with one’s job. However, there is a relative dearth of research in terms of team commitment, especially in educational settings. Teamwork is considered a 21stcentury skill and higher education institutions are focusing on helping students to develop teamwork skills by applied projects in the coursework. But studies have demonstrated that creating a team is not enough to help students build teamwork skills. Literature supports the use of team contracts to bolster commitment, among team members. However, the relationship between team contracts and team commitment has not been formally operationalized.This research category study presents a mixed-methods approach towards characterizing and operationalizing team commitment exhibited by students enrolled in a sophomore-level systems analysis and design course by analyzing team contracts and team retrospective reflections. The course covers concepts pertaining to information systems development and includes a semester-long team project where the students work together in four or five member teams to develop the project deliverables. The students have prior software development experiences through an introductory systems development course as well as multiple programming courses. The data for this study was collected through the team contracts signed by students belonging to one of the 23 teams of this course. The study aims to answer the following research question: How can team commitment be characterized in a sophomore-level system analysis and design course among the student teams?A rubric was developed to quantify the team commitment levels of students based on their responses on the team contracts. Students were classified as high or low commitment based on the rubric scores. The emergent themes of high and low commitment teams were also presented. The results indicated that the high commitment teams were focused on setting goals, effective communication, and having mechanisms in place for timely feedback and improvement. On the other hand, low commitment teams did not articulate the goals of the project, they demonstrated a lack of dedication for attending team meetings regularly, working as a team, and had a lack of proper coordination while working together. 

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5. Building your dream team for change

   Margherio, C.; Doten-Snitker, K.; Litzler, E.; Williams, J.; Andrijcic, E.; and Mohan, S. (June 2019, American Society for Engineering Education)

   This panel paper presents research on connecting theory to practice and the lessons learned in a change project, with a focus on team formation during the early stages of change making. An important yet often overlooked step in any change project is pulling together individuals to form a competent and efficient team. The literature has identified six key characteristics of a guiding coalition (i.e., an effective change-making team): position power, expertise, credibility, leadership, trust, and a common goal. In this qualitative study of 10 teams working on systemic change projects at their respective institutions, we examine the process of team formation through the framework of guiding coalitions. We find that the characteristics of a guiding coalition shift and evolve over time, as relationships among team members (and with their stakeholders) continue to grow. The results presented in this paper connect theory to practice, sharing practices for building effective change-making teams within higher education. Permalink: https://peer.asee.org/32489. 

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