Also the preloaded comments can stimulate the participant's memory and remind him of related issues. Preloading comments can also prevent participants from focusing on the most recent events. TA has been used successfully with several student groups within the School of CIS at the University of South Alabama to evaluate course content and instructor performance. Students are able to understand and use the tool effectively with as little as 10 minutes of training. Student comments indicate that most of them consider the assessment feature an important improvement in the process, particularly for improving confidence that the meeting record reflects the relative opinion of the group.
Students are eager to discover whether their opinions are supported or rejected by the group.
The anonymity provided by TA would be especially valuable to industry groups performing a strategic analysis. TA uses a database engine to store the data in .dbf format tables. This allows for easy export to DBMS and spreadsheet programs for custom formatting and ad hoc analysis. For research purposes, the tool maintains a log of the voting pattern for each participant based on a randomly assigned login identification code. This allows researchers to study voting patterns and determine if participants are influenced by the dynamic feedback TA provides.