[AISWorld] Seeking Non-US Collaborators for Virtual Teams Project

[Rosalie Ocker]

*Seeking Non-US Collaborators for Virtual Teams Project*

We invite you to have your class(es) participate in a multicultural virtual
team learning activity.  The project task focuses on establishing
information requirements for a multinational, non-profit scenario and is
designed to provide learning opportunities for a variety of students
including those focusing on IT, computer science, business, engineering and
the social sciences.  We invite you and your students to participate.  We
have run six successful projects to date involving over ~2000 students from
8 countries and 18 universities.

The project will take five weeks to complete and will run from Oct 4 – Nov
7.  Students work in small collocated subteams of ~ 5 members from their
class; each subteam is paired with another subteam of ~5 students from a
class in another university to form an overall virtual team of ~ 10
students.  The project is well-structured, and includes three learning
modules on effective teaming in partially distributed teams, each with
weekly content and group process activities and deliverables (see
https://collab.ist.psu.edu/pdtinfo).  The final project deliverable is a
written report describing the functional requirements for the system, as
well as prototype designs of the user interface and dashboard.

Instructor support materials are included (e.g., weekly teaching notes, ppt
slides) and an online synchronous training session for instructors is held
prior to the start of the project.  Using a pre-defined grading rubric, all
assignments will be graded by assistants at Penn State.  Of course, you are
welcome to grade deliverables, assign grades, and customize presentation of
the materials to your students.  To encourage evenness of participation
across courses, we ask all instructors to weight the project at least 15% of
the course grade.

A system is provided to support team collaboration, using Moodle as the
platform (http://moodle.org/).  The collaboration system includes a
discussion board, file share/repository, chat, and a team calendar, as well
as all instructions and all project materials. It supports both within-subteam
and across-subteam work.  Instructors can log on and view all project
materials, as well as monitor their students’ progress.  All administrator
functions are handled by Penn State.

Student comments regarding the project include:

   - “I had a great time interacting with the US team members.”
   - “I think that this was a good experience and that I will definitely
   take away a lot of good lessons from this. I feel that I will be better
   prepared when I have to do something similar to this in the real world.”

Comments from instructors include:

·       Thanks for the chance for me and my students to join the PDT
project. I look forward to joining your next PDT project.

·       The teaching notes and training session were really helpful…the
project was smooth.

·       My students believe that this has been a positive experience.

This is an exciting project that students both enjoy and learn from.  Please
contact Rosalie Ocker at rocker at ist.psu.edu for further information.



We look forward to you and your students joining this project.

Sincerely,

Rosalie Ocker
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