Students' perceptions of a virtual team assessment item (VTAI): An Australian case study

In today's global business environment, business graduates are often required to work as members of virtual teams. This paper presents the findings of an electronic survey of distance education students' perceptions concerning a virtual team assessment item (VTAI) using asynchronous discussion. The VTAI was set for an undergraduate marketing course at an Australian university. The findings revealed that while the distance education students did not necessarily enjoy the VTAI and found the assessment task to be both frustrating and time-consuming, they agreed that the task was beneficial to their learning and should be included in future course offerings

'First Portal in a Storm': A Virtual Space for Transition Students

The lives of millennial students are epitomised by ubiquitous information, merged technologies, blurred social-study-work boundaries, multitasking and hyperlinked online interactions (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). These characteristics have implications for the design of online spaces that aim to provide virtual access to course materials, administrative processes and support information, all of which is required by students to steer a course through the storm of their transition university experience. Previously we summarised the challenges facing first year students (Kift & Nelson, 2005) and investigated their current online engagement patterns, which revealed three issues for consideration when designing virtual spaces (Nelson, Kift & Harper, 2005). In this paper we continue our examination of students’ interactions with online spaces by considering the perceptions and use of technology by millennial students as well as projections for managing the virtual learning environments of the future. The findings from this analysis are informed by our previous work to conceptualise and describe the architecture of a transition portal

Assessment strategy for virtual teams undertaking the EWB Challenge

[Abstract]: The Engineers without Borders (EWB) Challenge has been incorporated into a core first year course in the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying at University of Southern Queensland. This paper examines an assessment strategy which supports developing a team and problem solving process as well as the final outcome for the team. The assessment strategy aims to encourage teams and individual students to develop practices and strategies which can be used in other projects and problem solving situations as well as producing this one team report in one course. The team and problem solving process is critical as the majority of our teams work as virtual teams having no face to face contact with either other team members or facilitator. Significant emphasis is placed on developing strategies for virtual team work and encouraging individual student learning in line with individual learning goals set with consideration of prior knowledge and experience

Access to Core Course Materials Project: DigiCOMS: report of the pilot service

One of the objectives of the Access to Core Course Materials Project was to set up, run and evaluate a pilot electronic study pack service. The needs analysis demonstrated that the service needed to encompass a range of materials and so the service was broadened to include a variety of electronic course materials. The service included the production of electronic study packs, but also offered a digitisation service for other types of course materials; in particular a facility to make available in-house produced publications such as course handbooks and lecture notes. Related to this work was a separate project funded by a grant from the Sub-Committee on Innovation in Learning, Teaching and Assessment (SCILTA) in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health. The Project Officer was involved in setting up an intranet site to distribute a range of electronic course materials. The Department were particularly keen to include online assessment and for this reason it was decided to build the site using WebCT. This gave the Access Project direct experience of using virtual learning environment software, which could be compared to the simple course material system that was devised in-house. A full report of this project is available; however, the issues of relevance to the DigiCOMS service and an outline of the work is also discussed within this report

TOWARDS A WITTGENSTEINEAN LADDER FOR THE UNIVERSAL VIRTUAL CLASSROOM (UVC)

The aim of this work is to move from the foreign dominated to the self-dominated by encouraging people to draw their own conclusions with the help of own rational consideration. Here a room as an environment that is encouraging innovation, which can be denoted as “Innovation Lab”, and making processes as can be regarded as “Smart Lab” is an essential base. The question related to this generalized self-organizational learning method investigated in our paper is how a UVC, which is a room that connects people from different physical places to one synchronous and virtual perceivable place, which is built on these preconditions, can be operated both resource and learning-efficient for both the course participants and the educational organization. A practical approach of implementing a virtual classroom concept, including informative tutorial-feedback, is developed conceptually that also accounts for and implements the results of reinforcement machine-learning methods in AI applications. The difference that makes the difference is gained by reimplementing the AI tools in an AI instrument, in a “Smart Lab” environment and that in the teaching environment. By means of this, a cascaded feedback-loop system is informally installed, which gains feedback at different levels of abstraction. By this learning on each stage, in a collaborative and together decentralized and sequential fashion takes place, as the selforganizational implementations lead implicitly, also by means of the in the course implemented tools, to increasingly self-control. As such in the course, a tool is implemented, as generalizations by means of reinforcement learnings are to be emergently foreseen by this method, which goes beyond the tools, that have already been implemented before. This AI-enhanced learning coevolution shall then, predictively, as well increase the potential of the course participants as the educational organization according to the Wittgensteinean parable: A ladder leading into a selfly-organized future

Exercise/recreation facility for a lunar or Mars analog

The University of Idaho, NASA/USRA project for the 1990-91 school year is an exercise/recreation station for an Earth-based simulator of a lunar or martian habitat. Specifically, a stationary bicycle that will help people keep fit and prevent muscular atrophy while stationed in space was designed. To help with motivation and provide an element of recreation during the workout, the bicycle is to be enhanced by a virtual reality system. The system simulates various riding situations, including the choice of a mountain bike or a road bike. The bike employs a magnetic brake that provides continuously changing tension to simulate actual riding conditions. This braking system is interfaced directly with the virtual reality system. Also, integrated into the virtual reality display will be a monitoring system that regulates heart rate, work rate, and other functions during the course of the session

Educating future product developers in collaborative product development : lessons learned from the european global product realization (EGPR) international course

Changes in the business environment, responses of companies to these changes and the available information and communication technologies (ICT) pose a number of challenges to present and future product developers, as well as to educational institutions. An appropriate response to these challenges is to create a solid basis for strategies to combat stronger competition, since existing educational programs have provided this only to a small extent. In our opinion, the E-GPR course carried out by 5 European universities reflects the tasks of professional product development teams and their work conditions as realistically as possible and will enable students attending the E-GPR course who will soon enter the professional world to later progress along a steeper learning curve. This paper focuses on the role of communication between members of virtual teams and presents experiences gathered during the organization, designing and performance of each year’s courses

Knowledge Management Using Student Feedback: A Study Of Online Students’ Lived Experiences On Virtual Teams

Introducing group projects in online courses provides an excellent learning laboratory for students to experience what it is like to work on virtual teams. This qualitative study leverages a knowledge base containing feedback captured in a university learning management system from a population of thirty-four students in an online M.B.A. project management course over three semesters to examine the lived experience of students assigned to virtual work teams. Anonymous student discussions about their successes and challenges while collaborating on virtual teams to deliver a final research paper are reviewed. A grounded theory is proposed and best practices provided for instructors interested in including virtual team projects in their own online courses