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Used by +150 educations

Enhance academic and social engagement with streamlined group work, saving you time and energy while increasing student wellbeing.

Here’s an overview of our service

The service can be tailored to your education-specific needs and used for all types of group work and collaboration.
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1

Easy online self setup

An educator or other admin accesses an education-specific coordination file in which you add relevant information for group formation, such as deadlines, grouping size, and tailored questions. The fully customizable questionnaire gives you control over criteria and the ability to influence how students are allocated into groups.

2

Students completes a short questionnaire

Share a link with your students for a 10-minute questionnaire that includes tailored questions, expectation questions, and competency statements. We'll identify students who have not completed it and either randomly assign them to groups or remind them to do so.

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3

The algorithm analyzes
and creates optimal groups

Our algorithm analyses all answers and places students into balanced groups with diversity in demographics but equal expectations and different competencies because this has proven to optimize student's engagement and sense of belonging.

4

See, edit, and share groups from the admin portal

All groups are uploaded to our admin portal for viewing, editing, and sharing of groups with students. To share the groups, students are sent an email containing group details, such as member names, ice-breaker exercises, conflict resolution tips, and any additional tailored information. If needed, late-arriving students can also be manually added to a group on the portal.

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5

Ongoing support for students and administrators

Unihelper offers continuous assistance to students and staff throughout the entire group formation process, from before to during and after. We provide practical tips and tricks for engagement, and we are always available to address any questions or challenges that may arise to maximize the benefits of group work.

6

Get insights into the student’s experience with the group work

Unihelper collects student feedback on group work through surveys, including a standard set of questions and the option for administrators to add their own. We summarize the key insights trends and discuss potential improvements for future group creations.

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7

Re-allocation of groups (optional)

Unihelper allows unlimited group re-allocations, which helps students broaden their network and work with different people. This is usually done at the beginning of a semester or halfway through the semester.

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Educators’ stories

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“For the first time, I managed to have groups of the same size (as all the active students filled out the questions) and the groups worked really well. It also meant that I could concentrate on preparing the teaching and interacting with the students about the academic content instead of being preoccupied with making the groups"

Helle Alsted Søndergaard

Course-Leader

Frequently asked questions

  • How did you develop this service?
    Unihelper was developed back in 2018 together with students, researchers in group dynamics, educators, and student counselors; more than 20,000 students have since used it. Through this process, we learned that our algorithm needed to focus on grouping students based on specific criteria, such as geographical conditions and genders, shared goals and ambition toward studies, and diverse competencies and roles related to group work. This allows us to create groups that are diverse in terms of gender, background, and age, have equal expectations, and finally, have the ability to leverage each other's different skills to solve more complex problems.
  • Which parameters do you use for group creation?
    In addition to identification questions such as name, contact info, and student number, there are 27-28 questions, consisting of a tailored section and questions regarding the level of expectations and competencies. Tailored questions: The first thing we focus on when forming groups is the 2-3 tailored questions. All 150 education we have worked with are different, and they have different experiences and needs regarding how they want their students to be allocated in groups. That is why we have made it possible to add tailored questions to the algorithm, such as gender, geographical conditions, age, nationality, whether or not you are commuting, and so forth. Any sort of question and how you would like the students to be allocated based on their answers can be added here. Expectations: The following two questions students answer are made to ensure they have equal expectations towards the group work, which we have developed with students and student advisors. Competences: Finally, students answer 24 skill-set-oriented questions. We have made these in collaboration with researchers in group matching, and they recommended we focus on student competencies regarding group work rather than personality types. Here, we ensure that the students can contribute with different skills within each group, making them as diverse in competence as possible. We do this because students should complement and learn from each other's strengths and weaknesses when dealing with problem-solving in projects and reflect and learn about their strengths and weaknesses.
  • How long does it take for students to answer the questionnaire, and how do they access it?
    It only takes 8-10 minutes to answer the questionnaire, which can be accessed from their smartphones or computers. The way it works is that unihelper generates an education-specific link that you share with the students.
  • Does education staff or students have to sign in to a platform to use unihelper?
    Thankfully, no. We know that educators of students already have plenty of different platforms and logins they have to keep in charge of. We simplified it by just typing their email address when answering the questionnaire. Afterward, all communication with the students will then be done by email instead of them having to download an app. All communication between the unihelper and educators/administrators will also be done through email.
  • Can I also use unihelper even if I have a small group of students?
    Yes, we create groups for classes ranging from 10 to 750 students. So, no matter the class size, taking the group creation process very seriously is essential.
  • Why can’t I just create groups randomly or ask students to self-assign into groups?
    Even though it's done with the best intentions, putting randomly assigned students into a group often results in conflicts since the students most likely have different working styles, requirements, and backgrounds; some may be commuting or have children. Self-selection groups can be terrifying for students who don't know who to work with and can result in them feeling left out. For both methods, we have experienced that the students were dissatisfied since they pay a large amount of money to study in HE, and their social and academic success depends on the work within their groups. Therefore, they demand that group formation is taken very seriously, and professionalizing the process underlines the importance of group work and that the HE institution also takes them very seriously.
  • Do we have to integrate unihelper with our LMS in order to use it?
    Luckily not. We know how complex and time-consuming it can be to integrate with existing systems, so we build a tool that operates independently. Unlike other SaaS tools for higher education, unihelper is surprisingly easy since it's 100% cloud-based. It can be set up when all formalities are done, and groups can be ready for use in less than 1 hour.
  • How do you take care of GDPR and Privacy
    Great question! We take this extremely seriously, and if we hadn't done so, we would not have been able to create groups at 150 different schools in three countries.
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