Group Work

Cross Cultural Group Work

Research on teamwork in professional contexts illuminates the issues that arise for students as well.   The issues come from sources other than differences of language or classroom experience; they can come from different views of organizations, hierarchy, decision-making, and -- perhaps most important -- expressing agreement or disagreement.  Whether students see these differences as being individual or culture may be less important than helping them identify differences and work through them. 

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Improving Teamwork Through Online Synchronous Discussions

A short video on this teaching strategy can be seen here. 

Robin Fowler, College of Engineering, co-teaches Introduction to Engineering, a course in which student teams design, build, and test products for professional scenarios (e.g., Company X needs a remote-operated vehicle to investigate subglacial life at the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica). Teams need to apply course concepts to evaluate competing designs relative to client-generated objectives and constraints. However, teams often pursue suboptimal designs due to poor group process.

To enable more equitable and conceptually sound design decisions, Fowler shifted team meetings from face-to-face discussions to synchronous, text-based online discussions, during which team members are geographically dispersed. Fowler creates a Google Doc for each team, including each student’s individual project idea and a decision-making matrix to be completed as a team. Students simultaneously access these materials and negotiate decisions at preordained times using the commenting and chat features in Google Docs. Read more »

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