Effecting teamwork outcomes in online courses

Effecting teamwork outcomes in online courses

BACKGROUND: Teamwork is a critical graduate attribute for engineers, so universities formally incorporate such activities into individual courses in their degree programmes. Because conditions for effective teamwork relate to interpersonal variables such as positive interdependence and promotive interaction (Felder, Woods, Stice, & Rugarcia, 2000), the affordances of team-based learning activities can be diminished in online environments, where the immediacy of interaction can be lost (Fisher, Phelps, & Ellis, 2000). What is unknown is what occurs in the operation of teams that can make them work well or cause them to fail.
PURPOSE: The objective was to discover what practices occurred in teams that had direct interaction and how they differed to teams which relied on the internet for contact.
DESIGN/METHOD: A critical realist approach was used to examine data from student reflections on how their groups functioned during a semester of study in a project-based engineering course. The reflections were analysed using the CMO framework of Pawson and Tilley (1997), in which contexts (C) and mechanisms (M) interact to produce outcomes (O). Contexts are the 'spatial and institutional locations of social situations, together with the norms, values, and interrelationships found within them' (Pawson & Tilley, 1997). Mechanisms 'refer to the choices and capacities which lead to regular patterns of social behaviour' (Pawson & Tilley, 1997).
RESULTS: Positive outcomes were only produced when a positive mechanism was implemented. A positive mechanism could be implemented in response to a positive or negative context, but negative mechanisms were only implemented in response to a negative context. Sometimes, removing a negative context can result in another negative context being created.
CONCLUSIONS: The most effective action to overcome a negative context could be to support the introduction of a positive mechanism, since removing the negative context can have unforeseen side-effects of introducing another negative context which requires managing. The effect of distance between team members was not found to be an over-riding context that requires removal, since a number of other negative contexts can be encountered irrespective of how close team members are to each other.

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