The Polls are Open – In Trello!

If you’re looking for a great way to share ideas and have your students vote on them, you might like to take a look at Trello. While it’s commonly used as a project or task management tool, Trello offers a variety of other features available as “Power-ups”. The options available for Power-Ups range from things like connecting a Google Calendar, Agile Tools, and…voting.

The voting tool can be especially useful in the context of online courses. Especially for group projects, which was the focus of a recent redesign project. While the entire course was being redesigned, we used the voting feature in Trello specifically for the capstone project. 

The process

In it’s initial offering this semester, we’re allowing students to upload their proposals to Trello. One card with one proposal each. Students then use one vote (and one vote only) to select the proposal they think is the strongest. Trello makes it super easy to do this. Once you enable the Power-Up, it shows up in the card options. Simply click on the Vote button and you’ve cast your ballot!

Self-selection

Once the top proposals are selected, those cards are moved to the ‘next round’ which allows students to self-assign to the proposal they would like to work on, by adding themselves as a ‘member’ to the corresponding card.

Additional benefits

In addition to voting and self-selecting their teams, Trello offers students all of the traditional benefits of the tool, such as task management, status communications, due dates, making it a great tool for managing class projects.