She needed to be able to split all 238 students into teams and get them to work on their Deisgn problem as a group. 238:1 is far from an ideal student-teacher ratio. Dr Patel ran the activities using Rolljak's team mode which allowed students to join their pre-assigned teams and gave Dr Patel the full liberty to reassign them and move things about on the fly as the students were logging into the session.

All in all it was quite seamless getting all 238 students into the right teams.

Moreover, Rolljak's live participant monitoring panel allowed Dr Patel to identify which students were disconnected, due to connectivity issues or them deliberately closing or navigating away from the Rolljak tab on their web browser. This instant feedback was very useful for Dr Patel to assist those having connectivity issues and call out students who were disengaged.  

Time management is possibly the the toughest part of running such an online program. Getting participants to stay on task and finish on time is near impossible but Rolljak makes it possible. In fact, Rolljak makes it so easy. All activities on Rolljak are time-boxed - meaning you can centrally control all the activities and the amount of time students are given.

When setting up activites, Dr Patel chose the time she wanted to spend on each phase (we will explain phases in the next section) of each activity. While running the program live with the students, she was able to add more time on the fly when she sensed students needed extra time to finish their work. She also had the liberty to instantly call in all responses if a majority of the students were done before time.

Many times when the teacher or facilitator moves on to the next activity there are many stragglers left behind and there's no way to know who is actually on task. Dr Patel didn't have this problem. She was able to control all 238 students with the click of a button from her own screen!

Another challenge with running such workshops is ensuring equal participation. Getting all students to contribute to a group disussion or project is challenging. Some students tend to get disengaged and let their peers do all the work - what we like to call social loafing.

Rolljak handles this challenge in a unique way. Activities are set up in 3 phases:

Phase 1: Respond Phase

Phase 2: Collaborate Phase

Phase 3: Evaluate Phase

Each phase is time-boxed, meaning you can control the time spent on it. By setting it up this way, students have to contribute their thoughts and ideas before moving on to collaborate with their group mates. Moreover, with Rolljak all student responses are automatically collected immediately when the time ran out, regardless of if they're done or not.

Requirement 4: Students should be able to collaborate freely and work together on a design challenge

Even the collaboration phase ensures equal particiation. Once all responses are collected, every student's response is randomly given to someone else to improve or modify. In Dr Patel's case, they were randomly rotated within each team, so that each team member would be able to add on to what their peer had done. This phase-based approach to collaboration is similar to collaborative sketching (6-3-5) - a popular Design Thinking method.

She ran the collaboration phase two times, meaning each student was able to collaborate on two random responses - one at a time. 

Once she had gotten students to respond - be it for listing innovation opportunities, problem statements or ideas - she needed them to be able to give feedback to their group mates and converge the group's discussion on to something, so that they could move their discussion (and their group project) on to the next step.

Tagging: To create quick affinity maps she used categorization (or tagging) as an evaluation type. She then got them to make categories of opportunities identified by tagging their peers' responses. This allowed the student teams to have a few themes to work with for the next activity.

Rating: Rolljak allows you to create up to 8 parameters on a scale of any between 1 to 3 and 1 to 1000 to evaluate responses.

Crowdfunding: Perfect for ideation and brainstorming, this peer evaluation gives each partcipant a sum of money, called Rolljak coins, to spend to back or invest in ideas they believe in (in denominations of $50).

Comments: Dr Patel got students to upload photos of their prototypes and get feedback in the way of comments. Their group mates commented on their work and provided useful insights, highlighted what they liked and gave suggestions for improvements.

After each activitiy, Rolljak shows the top rated responses from each team as voted on by the participants themselves. It is a great place to showcase all the work done by the partcipants. For Dr Patel, this was her way of getting students to speak up about their ideas and present them to all their peers.

Dr Patel even included leaderboards for added gamification to promote some lighthearted competition, but without disregarding the importance of collaboration. She used Rolljak's badges (which convert to points) to participants who do collaboration and peer evaluation fully. Rolljak tracks this with its proprietary participant tracking, explained in the next section.

Rolljak can identify when students are not collaborating. If a participant submits an identical response without any changes (be it text or sketch), Rolljak can pick up on that. Moreover, if a participant does not perform peer evaluation (or even if they do it partially), Rolljak can identify such behaviour. This affects the participants leaderboard score and even the engagement score (covered in the next section).

Dr Patel used this intelligence to encourage students who were not awarded badges to put in more effort during the activities and thrrough this effort, she saw significant improvements in the number of students being awarded these badges as the workshop went along. Meaning, more students were collaborating and doing peer evaluations. What a big win!

Documenting responses can be quite a drag when conducting Design Thinking workshops. With Rolljak, Dr Patel had instant documentation of all student responses. More importantly, this repository was sharable with the students, their teachers and their parents. She could easily copy a sharable link to the repository or export it to PDF and share it via email or social media. She even exported it to excel and sent a copy to all the teachers in case any of the student teams wanted to continue working on their projects after the workshop.  

Aside from documentation, Rolljak also provides session reports which detail the performance of every student and every team. Dr Patel used this information to identify students and teams who needed extra attention and communicated this information to their teachers.

The innovative bit here is the engagement score, which is an amalgamation of a number of factors:

How long the participant is active i.e. has the tab opened or has navigated away

How fast and often the participants are responding to activities

Are they collaborating and doing peer evaluation correctly

Based on this each student was given an engagment score at the end of it. When you're conducting a workshop, you're not judging participants by how many answers they get correct, because there are no right answers. Trainers like Dr Patel prioritise group outcomes and individual contributions towards the project objectives. Rolljak provides this information, in a way that is concise and easy to understand. This made it easier for Dr Patel to single out students who were completely disengaged and check in with them to find it if they were they facing a technical issue or was it something else.