Facilitating Collaborative Learning in Online Engineering Student Teams. Issue 1 (13th September 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Neill, Colin J.; DeFranco, Joanna F.
• Is Part Of: INCOSE International Symposium. Volume 26:Issue 1(2016)
• Page Start: 1219
• Page End: 1230
• Publication Date: 2016-09-13
• Subjects: Teamwork -- collaborative learning -- social construction -- online learning -- peer tutoring; Systems engineering -- Congresses; Systems engineering -- Periodicals; 620.0011
• DOI: 10.1002/j.2334-5837.2016.00222.x
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2334-5837

Abstract

Abstract: 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.