Title: Collaborative Learning in a Cross-Atlantic Design Course

Authors: P.M Herder, A.L. Turk, E. Subrahmanian, A.W. Westerberg

Addresses: Dept. of Technology, Policy and Management Delft The Netherlands ' Dept. of Technology, Policy and Management Delft The Netherlands ' Institute for Complex Engineered Systems Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh USA ' Institute for Complex Engineered Systems Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh USA

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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DOI: 10.1504/JDR.2003.009831

Journal of Design Research, 2003 Vol.3 No.2, pp.71 - 80

Published online: 24 Aug 2005 *

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