With a belief in the need for a reform in education that prepares students for life, work, and citizenship in a globalized economy, leaders were determined to connect students across the district, state, country, and globe in global collaborative STEM projects. These projects were aligned to the standards but also afforded students the opportunity…

One of the challenges of global software engineering courses is to bring the practices and experience of large geographically distributed teams into the local and time-limited environment of a classroom. Over the last 6 years, an on-campus studio course for software engineering has been developed at the University of Queensland (UQ) that places…

Technology is recognised as playing a part in the changing landscape in higher education; altering delivery modes and providing flexible opportunities for learning. Research into the use of wikis has shown that they provide many opportunities for student learning and the development of twenty-first century skills, however, there has been limited…

Project-based learning is a widely used pedagogical strategy in engineering education shown to be effective in fostering problem-solving, design, and teamwork skills. There are distinct benefits to be gained from giving students autonomy in determining the nature and scope of the projects that they wish to undertake, but a lack of expert guidance…

Cooperative learning was applied in a graduate project management course to compare the effectiveness of asynchronous versus synchronous online team meetings. An experiment was constructed to allocate students to project teams while ensuring there was a balance of requisite skills, namely systems analysis and design along with HTML/Javascript…

This study investigated three aspects: how project-based collaborative learning facilitates cross-cultural understanding; how students perceive project-based collaborative learning implementation in a collaborative cyber community (3C) online environment; and what types of communication among students are used. A qualitative case study approach…

While collaborative learning and collaborative writing can be of great value to student learning, the implementation of a technology-supported collaborative learning environment is a challenge. With their built-in features for supporting collaborative writing and social communication, wikis are a promising platform for collaborative learning;…

Over the past decade, industry relevance and connectedness have evolved into a key requirement for students and their parents, who increasingly perceive employability upon graduation as a critical factor in the degree selection process. Simultaneously, professional bodies emphasise the need for high levels of industry engagement as a condition for…

The concept and use of the synchronous and asynchronous forms of virtual conferencing is central to the experience of global design education. Easy and ready access to people and information worldwide is at the heart of a paradigm shift in design practice and education, defined by collaboration and digital technology. The dream of smooth, global…

An online group work project for off campus students, using wikis as the collaboration platform, has been conducted successfully for several years. Students were given the opportunity and technical means to collaborate, and staff could assess individual students' participation. However, the actual level of collaboration was less than hoped for,…

This article explores project-based cross-cultural and cross-institutional learning. Using Web 2.0 technologies, this project involved more than 240 students and eighteen academic staff from seven international universities. The focus of this article relates to a project-based learning activity named "The Gift". At each institution the…

Choosing the "right" type of technology, either synchronous or asynchronous, to facilitate learning outcomes is a new challenge as the pace of emerging technologies increases and diversifies. Teachers are encouraged to design courses that require collaboration in online learning communities to facilitate the development of higher order…

This paper deploys notions of emergence, connections, and designs for learning to conceptualize high school students' interactions when using online social media as a learning environment. It makes links to chaos and complexity theories and to fractal patterns as it reports on a part of the first author's action research study, conducted while she…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' use of literature-based collaborative Internet projects (CIP) in their elementary classrooms. These practices require two or more classrooms to read and analyze texts on specified topics and then share responses over the Internet. The participants, all female, represented 15 different U.S. states…