No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Assessing the Work of Geographically Distributed Teams in Engineering-Design: Time Allocation in the Design Process as a Form of In-Class Analytics
Abstract
Engineering Design practice is increasingly becoming a global activity where individuals, who are geographically distributed, work together as a team. Although the mainstream core of engineering design trains students to face teamwork from a co-located standpoint, existing studies point out the benefits and tradeoffs of distributed team training. This article explores the complexities of working in distributed teams by assessing distributed team experiences on three different continents. To achieve this goal, the study was organized in two stages. In the first stage, a framework was developed based on a yearlong mixed-methods study where four engineering teams from two prestigious universities in Chile and the U.S. worked together on open-ended problem-based challenges. Subsequently, the data from other 11 teams including distributed work among students in Chile, the U.S., and Finland, in the period spanning from 2016 to 2017, was collected and analyzed. A time tracking research instrument was created assessing how teams allocate their efforts within the design process and how this allocation varies across co-located and distributed teams. In addition, 10 semi-structured interviews were conducted with students from the first stage in order to triangulate the information. Findings show that distributed and co-located teams spend similar amount of time in convergent and divergent design activities. Moreover, evaluators identified improvements in the end solutions designed by students since there seems to be a cultural and academic complementation in the solutions proposed by distributed teams. All teams tend to use more time on convergent activities rather than divergent ones, especially when preparing presentations for a larger class group. Special attention should be paid on the convergent stages of teams’ design processes in order to provide the right educational scaffolding to facilitate learning. This study sought to shed a light on the possibilities of working with geographically distributed teams, and we found that, overall, the trade-offs are not significant.
... Setting self-regulated design learning as a conscious purpose for BME education can be helpful to move away from the issues brought up by folk-design-pedagogy, and toward a more intentional educational experience for our undergraduate PBL courses. Future work entails the implementation of possible learning analytic tools that could support the tracking and self-management tools like time-on-task management monitoring (Hilliger et al., 2021;Miranda et al., 2020) and the triangulation of this case study with datapoints such as teaching surveys and other forms of qualitative assessment. ...
... To perform this estimation, the Engineering Education unit proposed to adapt a weekly paper-based timesheet that was being used to estimate student time-on-task in subjects that are part of the engineering design major at UC-Engineering [12]. This timesheet was adapted from previous work of Hägman, Honda and Yang [13], who measured the time that students perceive they spent on different activities that are part of a product design subject, including: concept generation, prototyping, and presentation preparation. ...
In recent years, instructional design has become even more challenging for teaching staff members in higher education
institutions. If instructional design causes student overload, it could lead to superficial learning decreased student well-being. A
strategy to avoid overload is reflecting upon the effectiveness of teaching practices in terms of time-on-task. This article presents
a Work-In-Progress aiming at developing a dashboard to provide teachers with visualizations of student self-reports of time-on-task regarding subject activities. A questionnaire was applied to 15 instructors during a set trial period to evaluate the perceived
usability and usefulness of the dashboard. Preliminary findings reveal that the dashboard helped instructors became aware about
the number of hours spent outside of class time. Furthermore, data visualizations of time-on-task evidence enables them to
redesign subject activities. Currently, the dashboard has been adopted by 106 engineering instructors. Future work involves the
development of a framework to incorporate user-based improvements.
The importance of prototyping in the design process has been widely recognized, but less research emphasis has been placed on the appropriate timing and detail of so-called "throwaway" prototyping during the preliminary design phase. Based on a study of mid-career professional graduate students, statistically significant correlations were found between the time such prototypes were created and design outcome. Building prototypes early on in the design process, or performing additional rounds of benchmarking and user interaction later on during the project (in addition to the typical early stage efforts), correlated with better design outcome, although the total time spent on these activities did not. The correlation between project presentations and reviewer scores are also touched upon. These findings suggest that the timing of design activities is more important than the time spent on them.
As universities seek to provide cost-effective, cross-cultural experiences using global virtual (GV) teams, the ‘soft’ communication skills typical of all teams, increases in importance for GV teams. Students need to be taught how to navigate through cultural issues and virtual tool issues to build strong trusting relationships with distant team members. Weekly team meetings provide an excellent opportunity to observe key team interactions that facilitate relationship and trust-building among team members. This study observed the weekly team meetings of engineering students attending two US universities and one Asian university as they collaborated as a single GV capstone GV team. In addition local team members were interviewed individually and collectively throughout the project to determine strategies that facilitated team relations and trust. Findings indicate the importance of student choice of virtual communication tools, the refining of communication practices, and specific actions to build trusting relationships. As student developed these attributes, collaboration and success was experienced on this GV team.
This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of
engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design,
and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly
reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering
curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then
detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to
teach, and outlining the research available on how well design
thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored
pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning
(PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on
its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year
cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally,
the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be
answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving
design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations
for research aimed at enhancing design learning.
Taking a constructivist, collaborative experiential learning approach to education and
training of global managers, we designed an on-line, 4-week virtual multicultural team
project and tested its effect on the development of management students’ cultural
intelligence, global identity, and local identity. The total sample of 1221 graduate
management students, assigned to 312 virtual multicultural teams, consisted of four
cohorts, each participating in one 4-week project; one project was conducted every year
between 2008 and 2011. All projects were designed in the same way, according to
principles of collaborative experiential learning, and offered a psychologically safe
learning environment that enabled trust building. Data on cultural intelligence, global
identity, and local identity were collected by way of web-based questionnaires at the
beginning and at the end of the project, as well as 6 months later. Team trust was
assessed in the middle of the project. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that
cultural intelligence and global identity, but not local identity, significantly increased
over time and that this effect lasted for 6 months after the project had ended. Trust as a
team level factor moderated the project’s effect on team members’ cultural intelligence
and global identity, with significant effects under moderate to high rather than low
levels of trust.
Qualitative research aimed at "mechanismic" explanations poses specific challenges to qualitative data analysis because it must integrate existing theory with patterns identified in the data. We explore the utilization of two methods—coding and qualitative content analysis—for the first steps in the data analysis process, namely "cleaning" and organizing qualitative data. Both methods produce an information base that is structured by categories and can be used in the subsequent search for patterns in the data and integration of these patterns into a systematic, theoretically embedded explanation. Used as a stand-alone method outside the grounded theory approach, coding leads to an indexed text, i.e. both the original text and the index (the system of codes describing the content of text segments) are subjected to further analysis. Qualitative content analysis extracts the relevant information, i.e. separates it from the original text, and processes only this information. We suggest that qualitative content analysis has advantages compared to coding whenever the research question is embedded in prior theory and can be answered without processing knowledge about the form of statements and their position in the text, which usually is the case in the search for "mechanismic" explanations. Coding outperforms qualitative content analysis in research that needs this information in later stages of the analysis, e.g. the exploration of meaning or the study of the construction of narratives.
URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs130254
Electronic monitoring research has focused predominantly on the reactions of monitored employees and less attention has been paid to the processes that trigger managers' decisions to electronically monitor subordinates. Employing a distributed virtual team simulation, this study examined the effects of dependence, future performance expectations, and propensity to trust on team leaders' decisions to electronically monitor their subordinates. Results indicate that team leaders electronically monitor subordinates more intensely when dependence on subordinates is high or future performance expectations are low. Moreover, team leaders are more likely to monitor in secret when dependence is high or propensity to trust is low. Although team leaders increased their level of electronic monitoring over time, this tendency was stronger when the leader had consistently low performance expectations.
Studying the collaborative behavior of online learning teams and how this behavior is related to communication mode and task type is a complex process. Research about small group learning suggests that a higher percentage of social interactions occur in synchronous rather than asynchronous mode, and that students spend more time in task-oriented interaction in asynchronous discussions than in synchronous mode. This study analyzed the collaborative interaction patterns of global software development learning teams composed of students from Turkey, US, and Panama. Data collected from students’ chat histories and forum discussions from three global software development projects were collected and compared. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis methods were used to determine the differences between a group’s communication patterns in asynchronous versus synchronous communication mode. K-means clustering with the Ward method was used to investigate the patterns of behaviors in distributed teams. The results show that communication patterns are related to communication mode, the nature of the task, and the experience level of the leader. The paper also includes recommendations for building effective online collaborative teams and describes future research possibilities.
Today's software projects are often distributed across multiple locations. This distribution poses new challenges produced by the cooperation across different countries, times zones, and cultures. Software engineering courses have to prepare students accordingly. This paper reports an experience on teaching a distributed software engineering course. In this course, students develop software in collaboration with five universities located in Italy, Hungary, Russia, Switzerland, and Ukraine. The projects allow students to face the difficulties of developing software in a globalized context, and provide a practical experience on distributed software engineering. We describe the major obstacles on organizing such a course, and we suggest best practices to achieve successful outcome.
This paper explores the challenges of creating and maintaining trust in a global virtual team whose members transcend time, space, and culture. The challenges are highlighted by integrating recent literature on work teams, computer-mediated communication groups, cross-cultural communication, and interpersonal and organizational trust. To explore these challenges empirically, we report on a series of descriptive case studies on global virtual teams whose members were separated by location and culture, were challenged by a common collaborative project, and for whom the only economically and practically viable communication medium was asynchronous and synchronous computer-mediated communication. The results suggest that global virtual teams may experience a form of "swift" trust, but such trust appears to be very fragile and temporal. The study raises a number of issues to be explored and debated by future research. Pragmatically, the study describes communication behaviors that might facilitate trust in global virtual teams.
Today, the boundaries of disciplines are in a state of flux. The borders are blurred and innovations occur due to the joining of different disciplinary tribes and interaction of teams with diverse epistemological backgrounds. It is not news that this increased diversity in using the design process can bring friction and clashes due to disparate interpretations of how to resolve a particular project prompt. The more ambiguous the project prompt, the more potential it has to raise disagreement.
This is exactly what happens in the ME-COURSE, a first year graduate course in engineering design that takes place in a renowned university in Northern California. The upside of all of this tension, however, is that the dissonance affords the combining and recombining of old information in diverse ways that can lead to innovation. This seems to be understood by educational settings such as this university, which seeks to recruit individuals from diverse backgrounds in order to unleash the creative potential of a team. In order for these different tribes to reach agreement and be successful, however, this dissonance has to be consciously orchestrated. For this to happen, educational strategies that foster healthy conflict need to be embraced.
Through the fieldwork I conducted for eight months with task-oriented teams from the ME-COURSE community, I learned that differences in academic beliefs exist in communities of practice that at a first glance seemed homogenous. This micro-segmentation in knowledge systems is mainly due to previous undergraduate training that plays a major role in conflict arousal within teams. Nonetheless, techniques that foster positive negotiations have been introduced through instruction in order to stage-manage this conflict and turn it into something valuable for team creativity. Some of these techniques have been heavily influenced through contact with Silicon Valley and vice versa, while other techniques emerge innately through the work of the students through construction of ephemeral trading zones (Galison 1999) and visual boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989). The use of ephemeral trading zones and visual boundary objects helps to effectively bridge the communication divide of team members from different disciplinary backgrounds.
In order to harness and better understand the virtues of diversity, I argue that visual diagrams and other forms of visual techniques arise naturally and become a potential strategy to tackle diversity without losing the advantages of embracing disciplinary diversity. In addition, new research methods need to be brought in to analyze things as intangible as team dynamics. Visual research approaches could be crucial in making these relationships visible for further analysis.
This dissertation is exploratory and limited in nature and scope, yet it opens the door to a new potential area of study. The study of team dynamics through visual diagrams and other visual techniques can be used both to support work that has been already done in visual research and engineering design education, and for future assessments on team work and negotiation in design education curricula.
Global software engineering education (GSEE) is aimed at providing software engineering (SE) students with knowledge, skills, and understanding of working in globally distributed arrangements so they can be prepared for the global SE (GSE) paradigm. It is important to understand the challenges involved in GSEE for improving the quality and experience of educators and students. This paper reports the findings of an empirical study on the socio-cultural aspects of GSEE. A case study was conducted involving 14 participants from ten different universities in eight countries. The data was analyzed using grounded theory's open coding procedure. The key contributions of this paper are the identification and description of seven dimensions of socio-cultural distance that caused several significant challenges in the courses: 1) language differences; 2) concept of time; 3) attitude toward grades; 4) assumptions about national culture; 5) differences in autonomy; 6) influence of the course lecturer; and 7) work habits. Recommendations from this paper that are expected to benefit GSEE educators and students include: cross-cultural orientation of students prior to the course; use of various strategies to support better comprehension of different English accents (e.g., speaking slowly, replaying recorded video messages, and text chatting); and educators familiarizing themselves and their students with the relevant GSE and GSEE literature.
Requirements Engineering (RE) includes processes intended to elicit, analyse, specify and validate systems and software requirements throughout the software life cycle. Mastering the principles of RE is key to achieving the goals of better, cheaper and quicker systems and software development projects. It is also important to be prepared to work with remote teammates, as distributed and global projects are becoming more common. This paper presents an experiment with a total of 31 students from two universities in Spain and Morocco who were assigned to either a co-located or a distributed team. Both traditional and reuse-based requirements specification techniques were applied by the participants to produce requirements documents. Their outcomes were then analysed, and the approaches were compared from the point of view of their effect on a set of performance-based and perception-based variables in co-located and distributed settings. We found significant differences in only productivity (Z = −2.320, p = 0.020) and difficulty (Z = −2.124, p = 0.034) as regards the scores attained for non-reuse and reuse conditions, both in the co-located modality. Our findings show that, in general, the participants attained similar results for requirements specification when using the two strategies in both distributed and non-distributed environments. Copyright
Context: Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the predominant form of software development for global companies and has given rise to a demand for students trained in GSE. In response, universities are developing courses and curricula around GSE and researchers have begun to disseminate studies of these new approaches.
Problem: GSE differs from most other computer science fields, however, in that practice is inseparable from theory. As a result, educators looking to create GSE courses face a daunting task: integrating global practice into the local classroom.
Aim: This study aims to ameliorate the very difficult task of teaching GSE by delineating the challenges and providing some recommendations for overcoming them.
This paper documents two studies in distributed idea generation at Texas A&M. The first study is a controlled two-factor experiment wherein three-person groups of mechanical engineering capstone design students generate solutions to a simple design problem using either brainstorming or a modified 635 method in either a distributed or collocated team. Eight groups participated in the experiment; two were assigned to each of the four experimental conditions. The ideas produced are evaluated in terms of quantity, quality, novelty, and variety, using a series of metrics described in the paper. The modified 635 method produced the highest quantity of non-redundant ideas; the team's distribution had no significant effect on the number of ideas they produced. Distributed teams using the modified 635 method generated the highest quality ideas, while collocated teams using the same method produced the most variety. Collocated brainstorming teams generated the most novel ideas. The other study presented in this paper documents the performance of two globally distributed Mechanical Engineering capstone design teams. These student teams are composed of members from Texas A&M College Station and Texas A&M Qatar in Doha Qatar. The two teams participate in a controlled ideation experiment to generate possible solutions to their respective design problem; a third team with all its members in College Station also participates in the experiment. The teams generate ideas using the modified 635 method. This experiment confirms that the modified 635 method is a viable ideation technique for distributed teams and seems to confirm that the quantity of ideas generated with the method is not dependent on the team's distribution. Furthermore, instructors for the globally distributed teams observe that the teams performed on par with typical collocated capstone design teams.
Economic globalization is increasingly affecting both the construction industry and academia. It is changing the traditional roles of civil engineers and construction managers. Cross-cultural collaboration and communication skills, multinational team management skills, the ability to overcome the social challenges of geographically distributed teams, and familiarity with construction materials, standards, and methods of foreign countries are vital for modern construction professionals. However, the traditional skills and education style of engineers and construction managers do not equip them to successfully deal with such issues. This paper describes the experiences of a university course International Collaborative Construction Management that was developed to educate the next generation of civil engineers to be more internationally savvy. Throughout the three years that the course has been conducted to date, students in Turkey, the United States, Israel, and Brazil were grouped in multinational teams. They collaborated to develop construction schedules, cost estimates, risk assessment plans and response strategies and to prepare bid documents for actual construction projects. Within the context of this course, students were introduced to the different challenges of cross-cultural collaboration and improved their technical/managerial skills through direct involvement in hands-on experiences.
The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the competing factors that impact the usage patterns and adoption of collaborative tools designed to support global virtual collaborative work. Through an analysis of frequency data and recorded interactions, we present findings from a semester-long study of design collaboration in the CyberGRID (Cyber-enabled Global Research Infrastructure for Design), a virtual collaborative space developed in Second Life to support design work in global virtual networks. We discuss tools designed to facilitate the collaborative interaction of seven global virtual networks of designers composed of students from The University of Twente (The Netherlands), Columbia University (United States), the University of Washington (United States), The Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (India) and the Helsinki University of Technology (Finland). Each domestic team was responsible for one component of an integrated design task including the creation of a work schedule, 3D building model, 4D model mapping the work schedule to the 3D model, and a cost estimate. We demonstrate that a number of factors impact tool usage patterns and adoption, including the simplicity of the tool, whether the tool promotes group cohesion, the emergent need for the tools, and local factors specific to the experiences of the domestic teams. We conclude with a discussion of the viability of Second Life as a platform for virtualizing the engineering workforce and highlight challenges of researching and developing tools to support global virtual networks of designers executing complex projects.
Successfully conducting in-depth interviews requires much more than being a good listener. Researchers must choose interview subjects carefully, push for concrete details, and pore over reams of transcripts to develop their stories. But the result can be a rich and compelling understanding of people's lives.
This article reflects on the intersection of traditional and information technology- (IT-) mediated education and proposes the need to develop a revised teaching pedagogy that better reflects the skills required for success in the 21st-century business environment. Building on the premise that neither a homogeneous traditional nor IT-mediated workplace is prevalent, it is argued that educational institutions should provide both traditional and IT-mediated alternatives, not simply because they make education more accessible to their students but because of workplace demands and therefore student needs for proficiency in the use of these enabling technologies. The implications of this premise are discussed in terms of communication skills, pedagogical and curricular change, tacit knowledge, and outcome measurement.
Today's construction engineering and management (CEM) graduates must have strong communication and teamwork skills; they must have the ability to work efficiently within colocated teams; and finally, they must know how to apply fundamental engineering, management, and computer skills in practice. However, the traditional CEM education does not equip future engineers and managers to deal successfully with such issues. The authors describe experiences from a course that focuses on modes of learning involving virtual collaboration, problem-oriented project-based learning, and role-based learning. The aim of this course is to combine experimental and experiential learning into a research driven experience. The course was codesigned and cotaught by two instructors from two universities. The learning outcomes and lessons learned during the introduction of this building information modeling (BIM)-enabled virtual and collaborative construction engineering and management course are discussed. Specifically, it is shown that the introduction of BIM in a virtual collaborative setting allows instructors to design a course that incorporates the use of more realistic scenarios that better simulate real-world challenges. Such experiences teach students how construction projects are executed in practice, how different disciplines rely on one other for information, what type of information is needed from relevant disciplines, and when and how this information could be exchanged/shared between tools and processes. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)EI.1943-5541.0000098. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
The purpose of this research review is to open dialog about quan-titative, qualitative, and mixed research methods in engineering education research. Our position is that no particular method is privileged over any other. Rather, the choice must be driven by the research questions. For each approach we offer a definition, aims, appropriate research questions, evaluation criteria, and examples from the Journal of Engineering Education. Then, we present empirical results from a prestigious international confer-ence on engineering education research. Participants expressed disappointment in the low representation of qualitative studies; nonetheless, there appeared to be a strong preference for quanti-tative methods, particularly classroom-based experiments. Given the wide variety of issues still to be explored within engineering education, we expect that quantitative, qualitative, and mixed approaches will be essential in the future. We encourage readers to further investigate alternate research methods by accessing some of our sources and collaborating across education/social sci-ence and engineering disciplinary boundaries.
Student project teams are an important and integral part of many engineering classrooms. This paper examines the social-and task-related dimensions of such co-located and distributed teams.Studies of distributed teams in the workplace observe that members often face social issues of building trust and cohesion that co-located teams do not. It is posited that distributed teams in the classroom must struggle with similar issues, and therefore skew into operating in a task focused fashion. In contrast, it is suggested that co-located engineering teams in the classroom regard teamwork from a socially-oriented viewpoint. A questionnaire was administered to co-located and distributed engineering student teams to assess members' self-rated team effectiveness and their team challenges. The results suggest that co-located teams, in some ways, may indeed be more socially oriented in comparison with distributed teams, and that this social orientation may be detrimental to team effectiveness. Likewise, distributed teams appear to be relatively more task focused.
3, 4, and 5 yr olds were tutored in the task of constructing a pyramid from complex, interlocking constituent blocks. The results indicate some of the properties of an interactive system of exchange in which the tutor operates with an implicit theory of the learner's acts in order to recruit his attention, reduces degrees of freedom in the task to manageable limits, maintains 'direction' in the problem solving, marks critical features, controls frustration and demonstrates solutions when the learner can recognize them. The significance of the findings for instruction in general is considered.
This paper develops four propositions that show that changes in the global job market for science and engineering (S&E) workers are eroding US dominance in S&E, which diminishes comparative advantage in high tech production and creates problems for American industry and workers: (1) The U.S. share of the world's science and engineering graduates is declining rapidly as European and Asian universities, particularly from China, have increased S&E degrees while US degree production has stagnated. 2) The job market has worsened for young workers in S&E fields relative to many other high-level occupations, which discourages US students from going on in S&E, but which still has sufficient rewards to attract large immigrant flows, particularly from developing countries. 3) Populous low income countries such as China and India can compete with the US in high tech by having many S&E specialists although those workers are a small proportion of their work forces. This threatens to undo the "North-South" pattern of trade in which advanced countries dominate high tech while developing countries specialize in less skilled manufacturing. 4) Diminished comparative advantage in high-tech will create a long period of adjustment for US workers, of which the off-shoring of IT jobs to India, growth of high-tech production in China, and multinational R&D facilities in developing countries, are harbingers. To ease the adjustment to a less dominant position in science and engineering, the US will have to develop new labor market and R&D policies that build on existing strengths and develop new ways of benefitting from scientific and technological advances in other countries.
Virtual Collaborative Learning for Building Design
- R Soetanto
- M Childs
- P Poh
- S Austin
- J Hao
R. Soetanto, M. Childs, P. Poh, S. Austin and J. Hao, Virtual Collaborative Learning for Building Design, Proceedings of the
Institution of Civil Engineers -Management, Procurement and Law, 167, MP1, pp. 25-34, 2014.
Teaching software engineering using globally distributed projects: the DOSE course
- M Nordio
- C Ghezzi
- B Meyer
- E Di Nitto
- G Tamburrelli
- J Tschannen
- N Aguirre
- V Kulkarni
M. Nordio, C. Ghezzi, B. Meyer, E. Di Nitto, G. Tamburrelli, J. Tschannen, N. Aguirre and V. Kulkarni, Teaching software
engineering using globally distributed projects: the DOSE course, In Proceedings of the 2011 Community Building Workshop on
Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development, pp. 36-40, 2011.