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Facilitating Collaborative Learning in Online Engineering Student Teams
Author(s) -
Neill Colin J.,
DeFranco Joanna F.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.2016.00222.x
Subject(s) - asynchronous communication , facilitation , set (abstract data type) , key (lock) , scale (ratio) , computer science , knowledge management , computer mediated communication , psychology , the internet , computer network , physics , computer security , quantum mechanics , neuroscience , programming language , world wide web
Team projects are commonplace in systems engineering education. They address a key educational objective, provide students critical experience relevant to their future careers, allow instructors to set problems of greater scale and complexity than could be tackled individually, and are a vehicle for socially constructed learning. While all student teams experience challenges, those in fully‐online programs must also deal with remote working, asynchronous coordination, and computer‐mediated communications all of which contribute to greater social distance between team members. We have developed a facilitation framework to aid team collaboration and have demonstrated its efficacy, in prior research, with respect to team performance and outcomes. Those studies indicated, however, that despite experiencing improved project outcomes, students working in effective teams did not experience significantly improved individual achievement. To address this deficiency we implemented theoretically‐grounded refinements to the collaboration model based upon peer‐tutoring research. Our results indicate a modest, but statistically significant, improvement in individual achievement using this refined model.