The Problem
In collaborative work occasions, sometimes there are people who don’t contribute and don’t do their share of work. Instead, they rely on group effort. These people are identified as free-riders (this behavior is described as free-riding). These people can be a burden for other members in the group because these members have to do the free-riders’ job for them. In universities, students are often assigned group projects, as professors see it as beneficial. With free-riders in the group, students may feel unfair, as they have to do extra work, comparing to other groups who have more hard-working members. Free-riding is likely to lead to intense in-group conflicts and thus affect group performances, and scores, of course, which is what the students care the most most of the time. Course instructors tend to use strategies and tools like peer assessments to deal with such problem, but it can often be ineffective.
“This project is a research on how technology can be used to support university group work and reduce free-riding through individual contribution visualization.”
Research
Benefits of Group Work: Group work can improve skills in communication and leadership. It also teaches students how to be a good team player. When there are conflicts between group members, it is a good opportunity for the students to learn how to resolve those conflicts themselves. Course instructors often believe that they can use group work to simulate real workplace environment, and they can prepare students for real workplace problems.
Peer Assessment: Many course instructors use peer assessment as a way to evaluate individual performance and to encourage participation. Students are more likely to contribute when they know they are being assessed.
Existing Technologies: In workplace, many companies use task management tools for work distribution and evaluate work performance. Some popular software includes Trello and Jira, both developed by Atlassian.
Surveys and Interviews (User Research): There was a total of 30 participants, mostly students from the IT department. Participants were surveyed with 11 questions and interviewed with 8 questions. Results indicate that students feel difficult communicating with free-riders. Some even did not try to communicate, and instead did the work for them. Most participants had bad group work experience in the past, mostly due to the problem of free-riding. Most participants agreed that peer assessment is only effective when it accounts for a large portion of the individual grade. Most participants describes free-riding as frustrating and annoying. Most importantly, it is discovered that 22 out of 30 participants would choose to report the problem to the course instructor, hoping that the instructor would notice the distinction in the level of effort of each individual.
Visualizing Individual Contribution: According to user research, I looked into ways individual contribution and effort can be visualized. It is found that visualizing individual contribution can encourage student participation and contribution in group work because it is transparent who contributed less or more, and there will thus be comparison between group members. There will be peer pressure, and students do care about self-image. All these factors might encourage individuals to work harder. It is also helpful to value and appreciate individual contribution. This helps individual understand the importance of individual effort and how it plays a vital role in group performances.
Design
There are many task management tools that are used to assess employees’ work performance, but for assessing student group work, these tools need to be adapted to university context. To handle free-riding, there needs to be a system that visualizes individual contribution.
System Requirements:
Contribution Visualization: identify and visualize individual contribution and effort.
Task Distribution: Assist groups with task management and distribution. Individual contribution is assessed based on tasks completed.
Task Completion Progress: Group members can keep track of each other’s task.
Chat Room: main communication channel for group members.
Peer Assessment with ratings and comments: group members can comment and rate each other based on task performances.
Conceptual Model: click here if you want to see how I outline my system requirements and construct a conceptual model.
Prototype 1.0
The main prototyping tool used for this project is Adobe XD. Prototype 1.0 consists of most major features outlined in the system requirements.
Visualizing Contribution
Task Distribution: assign each task a specific score, an individual’s contribution is largely based on scores obtained
Individual Progress Tracking: an activity feed that shows who have completed what
Peer Assessment
Evaluation: Prototype 1.0
I conducted 5 user testing sessions. 5 IT students were recruited. User evaluation were guided by tasks. Participants were asked to complete 5 tasks. Short interviews were conducted after each session.
Prototype 2.0
In Prototype 2.0, modifications according to feedbacks were made. Some minor features were also added:
Schedule team meeting: showing up at meetings also counts for contribution
A page for establishing team rules
Team Mood Metrics: a number that shows the level of team happiness, raises group awareness and the importance of individual effort to group performance
Persuasive messages: encourage student participation
Play with my interactive prototype here.
Evaluation: Prototype 2.0
15 participants were recruited for this round of user evaluation. There were 25 tasks and 10 interview questions.
Project Outcomes
There was a demonstration at the end of the semester. I had to present to professors what I have done and walk through my prototype with them. Here are the main points concluded from professor and user feedbacks:
The purpose of this research is to find a way for technology to address the problem of free-riding, in the context of university group work. However, it seems like users feel that the designed system is more effective in encouraging participation and contribution and improve in-group communication, but not necessarily reduce the problem of free-riding.
Include other stakeholders, such as course tutors or instructor, might make the system more effective in reducing free-riding because students know they are in control of the scores.
Free-riding is a wicked problem. People have different personalities and work style. This is why collaborative work is complicated.
A long-term evaluation should be conducted in real group work setting for the results to be more accurate.
Major difficulties:
Contribution is hard to measure. Sometimes tasks cannot be accurately and precisely divided or assigned a score that complete represents the amount of work a task requires.
Some people are more of a “follower”, which they expect to be assigned tasks. They might not be good at picking up tasks, but this does not mean they are not hard-working.
On the other hand, some people can be control freaks, who want to do all the work, as they don’t trust other people’s work. They might sabotage other people from contributing.