A smart, equitable, and scalable approach to forming student teams

July 31, 2025

Educational Leadership: Open Educational Resources

Dr. Bowen Hui
Professor of Teaching, Computer Science

Teamable Analytics logo

Resource Innovation

Teamable Analytics: a web-based tool designed to support instructors throughout the team formation and monitoring process.

Dr. Bowen Hui and her team designed Teamable Analytics to support the varied pedagogical needs of instructors, making it easy to form student teams automatically with minimal hassle. The ultimate goal is to create equitable teams, improve learning outcomes and eliminate the guesswork that often accompanies team formation.

At its core it is a decision-theoretic algorithm—developed in earlier research—that scales to large classes and handles a wide range of constraints. Over the past four years, Teamable Analytics has been used in 50 interdisciplinary classes at UBC, supporting over 17,000 students. It’s fully integrated with Canvas and won the Best Demo Award at the International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference in 2022.

Key Capabilities and Impact areas

Functions Outcomes
  • Collect and combine student characteristics to form well-matched teams
  • Visualize team composition and fine-tune groupings with interactive analytics
  • Import gradebook data to monitor team performance over time
  • Gather and analyze peer evaluations—then regenerate teams if needed
  • Equitable team formation
  • Improved learning outcomes
Dr. Bowen Hui engages in discussion with a student working on a computer

Dr. Bowen Hui (left) engaged in discussion.

In the tool’s initial deployment, the team quickly realized that a one-size-fits-all approach would not meet the diverse needs of instructors and classrooms. In response, two additional algorithms were developed: a graph-based social algorithm to facilitate connections among student friendships and a priority-based hill-climbing algorithm designed to promote equity-driven goals, such as minimizing tokenism.

“As an educator, forming effective teams in large classes is one of the most persistent challenges—especially when you’re trying to balance project needs, student diversity, and your own pedagogical goals. That’s why my team and I built Teamable Analytics” — Dr. Bowen Hui

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