The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most universities to shift from traditional face-to-face teaching to remote learning. This sudden transition has presented numerous challenges for institutions that were unaccustomed to remote work, particularly in the context of senior design projects in engineering. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the…

Learning the effects of proximity and distance in collaborative work and understanding the challenges and possibilities of information technology use in distributed teams can be challenging for students. This paper describes a LEGO® simulation-based training program and shows how the use of LEGO bricks and a videoconferencing platform can help…

This qualitative case study was designed to explore how student services leaders adapted their leadership behaviors and practices in response to moving to the virtual working environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The case study site was a midsized university in southwestern Ontario. The data collected for the study came from three sources:…

Universities are increasingly leveraging virtual teams into their organizational structure and strategic framework for many functions including academic administration and faculty leadership. One benefit of a virtual workforce is the ability to hire the most qualified individuals regardless of where they are physically located. As the virtual…

This ethnographic case study explores intercultural and ethnographic engagement by undergraduate Hong Kong students enrolled in an Intercultural Communication course at a public research university. Ethnographic projects originated from virtual exchanges with undergraduates in a professional writing course at a private research institution on the…

Collaboration technologies play an increasingly important role in student teamwork in universities. With the proliferation of collaboration systems on the market and the wide range of features they offer, choosing an appropriate system can be an overwhelming task for college students. In this paper, the authors present an empirical study that…

This study explores critical incidents regarding differing cultures-of-use in telecollaboration against the backdrop of Hong Kong and German teacher education contexts. The rationale for the exchange was to model technology use and task design with the ultimate goal of internationalizing teacher education and supporting global citizenship.…

Researchers have found that the electronic methods in use for online team communication today increase communication quality in project-based work situations. Because communication quality is known to influence group cohesion, the present research examined whether online student project teams are more cohesive than traditional teams. We tested…

This article presents the findings of a field experiment in medical English with first-year medical students at the University of Pavia, Northern Italy. Working in groups of 8-10, the students were asked to produce a corpus of medical texts in English demonstrating how the human body is itself a meaningful text (Baldry and Thibault 2006: Ch. 1).…

This paper reports on an exploratory, descriptive, and interpretive study in which the roles of discussion boards, the students, the teacher, and the monitors were explored as they constructed a collaborative class project in a virtual environment. This research was conducted in the virtual program of a Colombian public university. Data were…

This study builds on this author's 2011 article in which the author reflects on the pedagogical challenges and resultant changes made while teaching two fully online foreign language papers over a four-year period (Y. H. S. Sun (2011). Online language teaching: The pedagogical challenges. "Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An…

Trust is a key factor in enabling effective team performance and, in online teams, needs to be built quickly and early. As universities expand their online offerings students are increasingly working in online teams. Understanding how trust development may differ in online teams versus face-to-face can have implications for online education…

The introduction of digital tools to a distance education environment often creates tensions due to students' past educational experiences and can require a shift in their concepts of the lecturers' and learners' responsibilities. The purpose of the study was to determine how well distance education students adapt to interactive online learning…