Title

Communication In Virtual Teams: Ten Years Of Experience In Education

Keywords

Communication; Curricula; Engineering education; Experience; Learning; Planning; Virtual teams

Abstract

Engineering teams are often globally distributed and comprise participants from multiple disciplines and cultures who rely on professional communication support. Companies, organizations, and institutions increasingly embrace these virtual teams and use a variety of information and communication technologies to support synchronous and asynchronous team interaction (e.g., chat, videoconferencing, email, group support systems, instant messaging, and forums). More and more, communication takes place without being face-to-face. Students should be prepared for such a workplace. However, it is difficult to emulate the specifics of real-world projects in a 100-hour university course. One way to bring the real world into the classroom is by combining the efforts of 100 students into a 10,000-hour project. This paper describes the Hong Kong-Netherlands project (HKNet) as an example of an integrated learning activity among multiple international institutions that brings the reality of engineering management with professional communication into educational contexts. Virtual teams comprising students from different parts of the world build websites on specific software topics that are then integrated into a single product. HKNet has entered its tenth year, and over 1000 students have participated. © 2008 IEEE.

Publication Date

9-10-2008

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication

Volume

51

Issue

3

Number of Pages

302-312

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2008.2001252

Socpus ID

51049110301 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/51049110301

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