TEAMMATES project scope

[damithc]

What's the core value proposition of TEAMMATES?

To facilitate highly-flexible feedback paths in education settings. It is meant to complement, and work side-by-side with, other LMS'es (rather than replace).

The above is not cast in stone, and open to pivoting/expanding. However, it was what TEAMMATES was initially created for and what it mainly does at this point.

What about peer evaluation? Our policy has been "you are welcome to use TEAMMATES for evaluation, but that's not the primary purpose of TEAMMATES". In other words, TEAMMATES is meant to be used more for formative purposes rather than summative purposes. Hence, we do not have things such as marks/grades in TEAMMATES. However, peer evaluation is not that far from peer feedback it's not inconceivable that we branch into this area as well.

How about expanding to other areas? For a while, we did toy with the idea of making TEAMMATES a more general communication tool e.g., for instructors to keep in touch with past students. However, given our limited resources, we eventually settled on favoring a sharper (albeit narrower) focus i.e., do only one thing, and do it so well that we are the 'best of class' for that one thing.
Most features added along those 'expansion' lines have been deprecated subsequently.

Artifact-based feedback (e.g., students giving feedback on essays written by peers) is another area TEAMMATES currently does not cover. The main reason holding us back in this area is the storage cost (as it requires file uploads). In addition, the workflow and even the UX will be quite different from what we have (it'll be like implementing a new software altogether). An example software that is focusing on this use case is PeerGrade

Your views are welcome! As mentioned above, we can always tweak the scope if necessary.