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The Use of Groupware for Collaboration in Distributed Student Engineering Design Teams
Author(s) -
Kirschman Jill S.,
Greenstein Joel S.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of engineering education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.896
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 2168-9830
pISSN - 1069-4730
DOI - 10.1002/j.2168-9830.2002.tb00724.x
Subject(s) - collaborative software , task (project management) , computer science , file sharing , multimedia , negotiation , teleconference , file transfer , human–computer interaction , knowledge management , transfer (computing) , world wide web , engineering , the internet , systems engineering , parallel computing , law , political science
An experiment was conducted in which teams of geographically distributed students used groupware tools to complete three tasks typically performed by the members of an engineering design team: generating ideas, co‐editing reports, and negotiating agreements. Four groupware‐supported team meeting formats using various combinations of audio, video, file‐transfer, and application‐sharing support were compared against each other and against a conventional face‐to‐face meeting. The results, measured as task completion time, quality of task outcome, and subjective user satisfaction, suggest that limitations of the hardware, software, and network bandwidth available at the time the study was conducted diminished any potential benefits of video connectivity and application sharing for distributed collaboration; however, audio connectivity was observed to be of great utility. The teams that used audio communication and file transfer alone between geographically distributed members achieved task completion times and task outcome qualities that were not significantly different from those of the teams working together in the same room.