We are happy to share that we have just released another extension to KlickerUZH with a focus on collaboration between students. For a detailed technical documentation, please refer to our official website: (TBD – coming soon)
With the introduction of group activities, we presented a new collaborative activity type in KlickerUZH, where students solve a set of questions based on individual hints, equally distributed among them (more details: KlickerUZH v3.1: Group Activities). However, forming groups in large lectures, where students might not know their peers can be challenging. KlickerUZH now offers randomized group creation for all students as an option in all gamified courses with enabled group formation!
Instead of creating their own group or joining an existing one, students are now able to specify that they would like to be randomly assigned to another group with peers that selected the random group formation as well (see screenshot below). At the same time, manual group creation continues to be available, and students can join each other’s groups until they reach the maximum number of participants, specified by the lecturer during course creation.
Until the group deadline defined by the lecturer (can be modified in the course settings), KlickerUZH will automatically create new groups every day, as soon as the number of participants in the pool is at least double the preferred group size (entered during course creation, not modifiable).
Once the group formation deadline is reached, KlickerUZH will automatically resolve all groups with a single participant. These students and all remaining ones in the assignment pool will then be distributed into different groups in a round-robin manner, trying to match the preferred group size as accurately as possible.
Similarly, lecturers can also trigger this finalization of the group formation phase manually on the new group overview on the course page (screenshot below). Please note that this action will automatically move the group deadline to the current day, resolve the entire assignment pool and students are no longer able to create or switch groups. To re-enable this process, simply use the group settings to move the group formation deadline into the future again.
We hope that this feature will simplify the group formation process in large classes. Additionally, randomized group assignments might be part of later extensions towards synchronized group activities in seminar classroom settings. As always, we would be happy to hear about your experiences with this feature and if it helped to promote collaborative KlickerUZH activities!