When should we meet? automating team formation for synchronous projects in online education

Organizing synchronous teamwork in self-paced MOOCs is complicated because students join and progress at different times. Typical methods like random assignment or student-selected teams from, for example, discussion forums can result in teams with limited availability to meet or significant differences in prior knowledge. In this work, we introduce an optimization-based approach for automatically creating effective project teams. Our approach prioritizes: (i) maximizing common availability (hours per day all team members are available to meet) and (ii) minimizing differences in course progress. Each student specifies their time availability per day; their progress is directly measured from platform activity logs in the MOOC as course progress. We formalize this as the Online Team Formation Problem (OTFP) formulated as mixed-integer linear programming problem and solve it using a multi-start heuristic approach to solve realistic scenarios. The algorithm ensures that each team has at least a given number of shared hours per day while minimizing the team members’ progress difference.