Students of today need to be prepared to work in globally distributed organizations. Part of that preparation involves teaching students to work effectively in teams to solve problems. Students also must be able to work with individuals located at distant sites where there is no or very little face-to-face interaction. The Runestone project, an international collaboration between two universities, adds new dimensions to student teamwork, requiring students to handle collaboration that is remote, cross-cultural, and technically challenging. Runestone is a three-year project funded by the Swedish Council for the Renewal of Undergraduate Education. A pilot study in 1998 was followed by a full-scale implementation in 1999 with another implementation ongoing in 2000.Each time this global cooperation project is run, both students and faculty learn important lessons in how to work with each other in a virtual environment. This paper discusses both student and faculty learning outcomes for Rnnestone 1999.

This paper reports selected results from the most recent of a series of international collaborative trials between students at Auckland University of Technology and Uppsala University. The trials require students to work together in virtual groups, comprising students from each institution, to perform a common task. The topic of this paper is how to form and sustain more effective virtual groups. In this trial a cyber-icebreaker task has been introduced and its contribution to group effectiveness is explored. Some conclusions are drawn pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses of this trial design, and some insights into effective design of electronic collaborative learning groups are gained.

No abstract