How do I create teams within Tandem?

Accessing Team Formation

You can access the Team Formation tool from the Manage Students page by taking the following steps:

1. Log in to Tandem.
2. Click “Menu” in the upper left corner.
3. Click “Students.”
4. Click “Manage Students”

If you have students who are not currently in a team you may also have a Tandem Setup banner on your Course Overview with a Manage Students button.

On the Manage Students screen you can access Team formation by clicking the Run Team Formation button at the top.

Team Formation Setup

Tandem uses your class list and your custom rules to form optimal teams. Tandem randomly creates 10,000 team collections and then chooses the run with the best score.

Team Size and Visibility

• Choose the minimum and maximum size for your teams. Tandem works best with teams between 3 and 8 learners. If you want to make teams outside that limit you will need to expand your team size after you run team formation.
• Choose that date you want team to be visible to students. We will display student teams at 6:00am on the date you choose. Set your "teams visible" date several days in the future if you plan to run Team Formation multiple times and don't want students to see their teams changing.

Team Formation Rules

Create a rule by selecting Add Team Formation Rule. To create rule:

• Name the rule
• Select the question the rule will use
• Choose the grouping type, importance, excluded options and strict rule matching

Notes about rules:

1. Rule Names are only visible by you and the teaching team. It's helpful to name your rule based on the question you select.
2. Each rule can only use 1 survey question. You will see both the Question Title and the Question Text, for example, BT_PastPositive and "My past teamwork experiences were generally positive".
3. Custom questions are also available for Team Formation. Learn more about custom questions in the Course Details article.
4. You will choose to either group students who answered the question similarly or differently.
5. When creating teams we weight each rule based on it's importance. If you choose Crucial Importance, Tandem will ONLY create teams that meet this rule. 
6. You can exclude certain response options that may not make sense for grouping, for example you might want to exclude None of the Above or N/A from the team making options.
7. Rule matching let's you choose if you want to allow for teams where only 1 person meets the rule. For example, you might allow a team where only 1 person has a lot of experience with a certain task.

(Optional) Response Groups

You can bundle responses together to make it easier to get at the results you want, for example you can group all students who say they live anywhere on campus and create a second group for anyone that says they live off campus. Tandem will only compare those two groups instead of each possible answer.

Reviewing Results and accepting teams

Choose Run Team Formation at the bottom of the screen once you have your rules set.

You will see your rules at the top of the screen and results at the bottom.

Each team will be given a score up to 100 showing how well were able to match your rules. The higher the score, the more closely the team matches your rules.

Pro tip: Fewer rules means fewer unassigned students. 

In the screen shot below you will see several teams with a variety of scores. Take note of Team 3 with a score of 30. One of the students on that team didn't complete the survey and thus we have no data for them. We will still attempt to put them on a team, but having no data will drastically impact the score.

At the bottom you can choose to Adjust the Rules, Rerun Team Formation with the existing rules, or Confirm and refine the team. If you choose to Rerun Team formation you can always return to previous results using the arrows toward the top of the page.

Create Teams Manually

Whether you decided to use Team Formation or not you can always manually assign students to teams. From the Manage Students page you can drag and drop students on to any time. If you do this after using Team Formation you will see how your choices impact your Team Formation team score.

You can also lock teams which freezes all students on that team and disables manual adjustment and Team Formation adjustment of that team.