Proceedings »
Effective collaboration and communication when working in teams are amongst the 21st century skills required to develop competent students that are able to address complex challenges. However, for most students, teamwork is a challenge by itself. Differences in availability, workload assignments, and sense of responsibility represent a challenge that increase with the group size. Effective engagement of diverse resources enriches any project outcome as a result of different backgrounds, experiences and expertise. Nowadays, technology imposes new requirements were faster communication tools represent expectations for faster outcomes. With these motivations, the objective of this research is to examine how technology enables this process in relation to team collaboration and communication. In particular, a methodology is developed to characterize teamwork in the context of web-based collaborative environments such as Google docs. The impact of this research is beyond traditional educational settings since web-based collaborative environments can be used as mechanisms to facilitate distance education while implementing project-based learning. Inspired by the game Guitar Hero, team iterations are analyzed. Using Google docs history option, a timeline is created of every edit in the order that they were performed and with details of the team member involved. Two case studies are performed to study how teams complete tasks during the Fuzzy-Front End’s ideation process with different techniques: radial thinking, analogies, inversion and morphological chart. Results have shown that students tend to divide the work with limited edits to the work of their peers. While students knew that the professor had access to the document, they still completed most of the work near the deadline. Additional results include detailed analysis of iterations per task completed.
Author(s):
Jessica Gonzalez
Industrial Engineering
UPRM
United States
Elizabeth Ayala
Industrial Engineering
UPRM
United States
Joshua Bonilla
Computer Engineering
UPRM
United States
Lourdes Medina
Industrial Engineering
UPRM
United States