Collaborative Learning in a Cross-Atlantic Design Course Online publication date: Wed, 24-Aug-2005
by P.M Herder, A.L. Turk, E. Subrahmanian, A.W. Westerberg
J. of Design Research (JDR), Vol. 3, No. 2, 2003
Abstract: Our activities in co-teaching an engineering design course across the Atlantic, i.e., at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA and at Delft University of Technology (DUT), the Netherlands, at the same time, required the use of information and communication tools for communication and collaboration purposes between students and between instructors and students. In this paper we analyze the overseas communication and collaboration processes among students and instructors, and their implications for learning. We have used a theoretical framework for collaborative learning and for stimulating active participation for analyzing our observations and for translating our results to a broader theoretical framework. In practice, it meant that we experimented among other variables with group compositions and with instructor role descriptions. We concluded that many of the techniques mentioned in literature did enhance collaboration and learning between students, but that intense communication with overseas instructors is still a major stumbling block.
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