Cross-Cultural Virtual Team Projects

Abstract

Future engineers require global and intercultural competencies to prepare them to work in an increasingly multicultural, digitized, and interdependent global economy. To enhance engineering students' international exposure, awareness, and cultural experiences, the authors developed a unique international virtual team program that engaged students in collaborative project-based learning with peers around the world. Each virtual team consisted of multidisciplinary students from various countries and institutions. The students' knowledge and understanding of intercultural competence were evaluated before and after the program to ascertain its impact on their understanding of intercultural sensitivities and collaboration in virtual teams. Recommendations for learning enhancements were proposed. The authors found the integration of intercultural content with the global virtual team projects to be a successful strategy for helping engineering students build intercultural competencies and virtual collaboration skills, in addition to technical engineering knowledge and experience.

Was transitioning to the virtual environment worth it: effects of different virtual team projects during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…initial frustrations associated with working with culturally diverse team members), thus leading to less of an increase in ISS ratings. Our findings suggest that instructors may circumvent some of the negative effects of VTPs by providing students with intercultural sensitivity training prior to the project and/or coaching students on how to manage conflicts arising from cultural differences (Ndubuisi et al, 2021). Predicting challenges depending on the type of project allows instructors to make informed decisions on the type of project suitable to the class and the desired outcomes, as well as anticipate difficulties and act proactively to avoid or at least reduce the extent of undesirable results.…”

“…initial frustrations associated with working with culturally diverse team members), thus leading to less of an increase in ISS ratings. Our findings suggest that instructors may circumvent some of the negative effects of VTPs by providing students with intercultural sensitivity training prior to the project and/or coaching students on how to manage conflicts arising from cultural differences (Ndubuisi et al. , 2021).…”

“…Bonding behaviors in VTPs account for variance in performance effectiveness and team identity and is significantly correlated with task type (expert vs non-expert projects) (Henttonen et al, 2014). It is, therefore, reasonable to surmise that students engaged in non-technical projects, and who are not required to build new technical skills, may have more time to devote to supporting their team members around nontask related concerns, such as those pertaining to the pandemic (Burleson and Peters, 2021;Ndubuisi et al, 2021).…”