How did Macquarie run their team-based learning classes effectively?

Macquarie University is located in Sydney, Australia. While only 50 years young, Macquarie has risen to be a progressive and influential institution both locally and internationally. Ranked among the top two per cent of universities in the world and with a 5-star QS rating, Macquarie is considered one of the world's best universities, producing graduates that are among the most sought-after professionals in the world.

They turned to InteDashboard's all-in-one Team-based Learning (TBL) platform to run TBL classes for their medicine program to save time and to get more data for student evaluation and assessment process.

We had a chance to talk to Matthew Robson, Senior Learning Designer for the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University and ask him about how educators and instructional designers embarked on using InteDashboard.

What problem(s) were you trying to solve with our product or service?

1. We did not have a significant amount of time to run our TBL activities at the end of each week. Hence, we needed to facilitate all phases of TBL efficiently to make the most of our face-to-face time with students.
2. Being a new medical program, we also wanted to collect as much data as we could for evaluation purposes. Facilitating TBL digitally provided us with a way to easily collect data on student performance week to week. This data was one part of a larger picture which provided us with valuable insights into our students, curriculum and program overall.

What have you been able to achieve since using InteDashboard?

We can easily and effectively run TBL within the short time we have with students. The data also provides us with valuable, actionable, rich data. The weekly RAT provides the faculty with information on how students are tracking as well as highlighting areas of the curriculum which need to be enhanced or reviewed.

InteDashboard can also provide students with meaningful feedback regarding their comprehension of that week's learning and threshold concepts. Students can easily identify knowledge gaps and understand how they compare to the cohort as a whole (thanks to the automated marking and analytics per question/item).

To make TBL that little bit more fun, we also used the data to generate a team leaderboard, which gets updated weekly in the LMS! Students loved it.

What features do you like the most in InteDashboard?

The feature which we find the most valuable is the automatic marking and item analysis dashboards. They effectively provide staff and students with information that help inform what the clarification session should address.

Is there anything else that you would like to comment on or say about us?

The InteDashboard team provides great support. The team has been responsive to our feedback when we asked for a possible enhancement to their tool in the past!