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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b style=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">Seeking Non-US
Collaborators for Virtual Teams Project Fall 2011</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">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 eight successful
projects to date involving over ~2500 students from 9</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: red;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">countries and 20 universities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">The project takes five weeks
to complete and will run from Oct. 3 – Nov. 6. Students work in small
collocated subteams of ~ 3 members from their class; each subteam is paired
with two other subteams of ~3 students, each from different universities. Thus, the
overall virtual team is ~ 9 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 <span style=""><u><span style="color: rgb(119, 153, 187);"><a href="https://collab.ist.psu.edu/pdtinfo">https://collab.ist.psu.edu/pdtinfo</a></span></u></span>). 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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">A system is provided to
support team collaboration, using Moodle as the platform (<span style=""><u><span style="color: rgb(119, 153, 187);"><a href="http://moodle.org/">http://moodle.org/</a></span></u></span>). The
collaboration system includes a discussion board, file share/repository, chat,
and a team calendar, as well as all instructions and all project materials</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: red;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"> 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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">Student comments regarding
the project include:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"><span style=""> </span>- “I had a great time
interacting with the US team members.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"><span style=""> </span>- “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.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">Comments from instructors
include:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"><span style=""> </span>- </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As a
lecturer of long-standing I would like to add that it has definitely been one
of the best opportunities to engage my students. I was also very
impressed with the organisation of the exercise. First rate.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">- The teaching notes and
training session were really helpful…the project was smooth.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">- My students believe that
this has been a positive experience.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">This is an exciting project
that students both enjoy and learn from. Please contact Rosalie
Ocker at <span style=""><u><span style="color: rgb(119, 153, 187);"><a href="mailto:rocker@ist.psu.edu">rocker@ist.psu.edu</a></span></u></span> for further
information.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">We look forward to you and
your students joining this project.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">Sincerely,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black;">Rosalie Ocker</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(136, 136, 136);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>