Description of a Need or Opportunity

At the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year I began teaching a new engineering course as part of the Project Lead The Way (PLTW) program. This is a program that allows students interested in the engineering field as a career get exposure to different areas of engineering such mechanical, electrical and architectural engineering. The course I teach focuses heavily on the design process and the students work frequently in design teams to come up with and present solutions to the problems they’ve been presented. In the class I have had business professionals as guest speakers from local businesses and manufacturers and they’ve talked a lot about the business they do with companies from other states and other countries. The business professionals have explained that often times the collaboration is done via video conferencing. Teams in different locations work together, communicate daily, set expectations, duties and deadlines without ever meeting face to face. These sessions allow for much of the same benefits as face-to-face meetings but are big time and money savers on the part of the industries. My goal is to be able to set up similar videoconference collaboration opportunities for my students with other classes teaching the same (PLTW) curriculum.

To make my plans a reality I have a few things working in my favor. First the computers in my classroom have been upgraded so that there is one for each student and all of them are equipped with webcams and Skype. Second, through the PLTW network I have access to teacher forums that I can arrange time for collaboration with teachers around the country. In our separate classrooms we the teachers will be able to introduce the chosen design problem to our own students, then we can assign groups of students to work with one another. Once the groups have been assigned they can meet either via Skype or another instant messenger program if the collaborating school does not have access to webcams. Students would be able to share files through email and work together through division of labor to create a presentation using PowerPoint or some other presentations software that sums up their final solution. At the beginning of the project the students will work with team members to establish a frequency and method of communication (Skype).

In researching the issue of electronic vs. face-to-face collaboration I was able to find several articles through the Google Scholar search feature.
• http://www.dastous.us/edtechadvocate/2.pdf
• Asynchronous Computer-mediated Communication
versus Face-to-face Collaboration: Results on Student
Learning, Quality and Satisfaction by ROSALIE J. OCKER AND GAYLE J. YAVERBAUM

In the above articles there is a pervasive trend that online collaboration has not adversely affected the level of communication or information flow between parties involved when compared to face-to-face collaboration. The findings show that one drawback is the level of connection or the “intimacy” of the collaboration experience is diminished when done online compared to face-to-face.

Over the course of the CEP 812 I hope to initialize the early stages of this project. I will put a “want ad” in the PLTW forums looking for teachers interested in a collaboration project and share how I’d like to have our classes work together on the one of the design problems that they must solve. Given the time constraints of this course the final design solutions created by the students may occur after the conclusion of this course. After the conclusion of CEP 812 the students will complete their final design solutions and work with their partners to create presentations to be shown to their respective classes. Something that should make this project more workable is that all PLTW courses use the same curriculum so any teacher that I am able to collaborate with will be using the same material I am. The design problems that the students address are typically laid out to be completed over the course of two weeks so I would look to keep that same time frame.

The success of the project can be gauged by several metrics. The first is the successful completion of the given design problem in a specified time that meets any given constraints. I have finished products that the students created without the benefit of the new collaboration experience and I can look for improvements in quality. Also, feedback from the students can be used to determine the value gained from the unique collaboration experience. The feedback from the students will be used to see whether there was shared quantity of work, open communication throughout the project, and if team guidelines were followed throughout the project. Ultimately I would like to see that the level of communication between the students was not adversely affected during their new collaboration experience.