Maritime Students’ Online Collaborative Learning in Virtual Teams: A Research Teaching Experience

Virtual teams are fast becoming a business-critical imperative for many organizations because of the popularity of the Internet, intranet, instant messaging, online discussion boards, video, audio conferencing, and other tools that have made it easier to communicate and coordinate people at a distance (Herman, 2001; Lewis, Shea, & Daley, 2005; Martins, Gilson, & Maynard, 2004; Townsend, DeMarie, & Hendrickson, 1996). Many educational institutions are similarly experiencing an increased use of information technology to communicate within and outside the classroom (Allen & Seaman, 2005; Le Cornu, Cameron, Catling, Cosgrove, & Langford, 2006). Therefore, developing learners’ ability to work effectively in a virtual team setting may be considered to be an important pedagogical goal for many higher education institutions. As online instruction becomes increasingly popular, instructors and administrators are working hard to improve maritime students’ online learning experience in the teaching of research. The use of collaborative learning through virtual teams presents a set of observations on how physical, temporal, and social separation of learners affects the learners’ learning processes in research. This paper is a case study reporting a research project investigating the experience of using virtual teams in the teaching of research. Online challenges were identified and potential solutions to such challenges were advanced.

 

Keywords: Virtual teams, online group interactions, online collaboration, online research team