Hanni Muukkonen and Minna Lakkala
UH University of Helsinki, Finland
November 8, 2006

Course name: Virtual project work course

Institution(s: University of Helsinki (UH), Helsinki School of Economics (HSE) and Helsinki University of Technology (HUT)

Course instructors: Pentti Marttiin, Göte Nyman, Matti Vartiainen and Jyrki Kaistinen

Scope: The scenario describes a) past practices and experiences, b) extended by suggestions for future implementation, which will probably be in two years’ time. The details of the future implementation are dependent on the instructors’ designing and pedagogical solutions.

No. of participants: 50

Target populations: Undergraduate students from the Department of Psychology (UH) and from the other two institutions (HSE and HUT)

Content areas/Disciplines: Organizational Psychology, project management, virtual work

Duration of the course: About 3 months

No. of instructional Hours: Seven 2-hour lecture meetings (= 14 hours) and distance work; two meetings between the clients and the coordination team, and team meetings throughout the course.

Additional background Information:
The whole study process in the course is organized to resemble an authentic, virtual project management process aiming at creating, in expert teams, innovative problem solutions for a genuine client. The special challenge for the students is to really manage to do the work in an authentic situation of participating in multi-disciplinary virtual teams with members from three universities.

Course description:
This higher education course has already been conducted several times in collaboration with teachers from three universities. One or two companies or public organizations participate in the course as collaborators and customers; for example, in 2005 the customers were YLE (Finland’s national public service broadcasting company) and TIEKE (Finnish Information Society Development Centre). The goal of the course is to get students acquainted with the theories and methods of organizing virtual, distributed work by participating in a virtual teamwork process themselves and conducting a study for the customer organizations. The outcomes of one team’s work should be a report and a presentation that describe the team’s solution for the customers’ problems. There is a special theme every year based on the customers’ needs and hopes. In 2005, such special theme was “Digi-human”, e.g. what are the future possibilities and challenges of a broadcasting company in offering innovative digital-TV services for people as workers, learners, citizens, consumers etc.

The participants of the course are students from all three universities, about 50 students altogether. Each university also has separate activities (lectures, essay tasks, etc.) for their own students in addition to this common course activity, decided by the teachers. Several teachers and tutors take part in the course as facilitators of students’ work; metaphorically they are described as the board of directors, not directly involved in the execution of tasks.

Working in the course is organized according to a project model, including team structure, planning, reporting, shared tasks and web-based collaboration tools; the same phase structure is also in each team’s shared virtual working space. All the tasks and accomplishments that the students are supposed to do are given as team tasks that simulate authentic project work and are relevant from the perspective of study goals, shared artifacts, and customers’ interests. Team management responsibility is rotating; in turn, each student is the manager in his/her team. The activities in the course include face-to-face lectures and face-to-face and virtual teamwork at the universities and at customer organizations. In addition to virtual project teams, one student group is a Coordination team whose task is to coordinate virtual teams’ work and mediate information between the teams, the teachers/facilitators and the customers. One student group is a Research team that is responsible for evaluating other group’s experiences and successes in virtual work through interviews and questionnaires.

In the course 2005, the teachers formed the virtual teams by collecting background information about the participants (by a paper questionnaire) in the first lecture and splitting the students to groups based on that. Each team had participants from all three universities to make them multidisciplinary. Coordination team and Research team were formed based on the voluntariness of the students: Those students who were interested in being participants in either team informed the teachers about that in the first lecture. A better way to form the teams could be to share the information of the students’ background, expertise and interests through a shared virtual space at the beginning of the course and let the students also participate in the construction of the teams with the support of some community tool that helps the group formation. Because of organizational purposes, the teachers should probably still be the ones who make the forming of teams, but taking into account students’ own wishes if it is not contradictory to course goals.

The task of the virtual teams is to conduct a study that relates to the original, authentic assignment of the customer. In 2005, such assignment was to study the future possibilities and challenges in offering innovative digital-TV services to people. In the first phase of the project, each team had to produce an “offer” about solving the customers’ assignment (i.e, what kind of innovative digital-TV services the team would develop in their project work plan). Each team writes its offer collaboratively in a written format following the instructions saved in the shared space by the teachers. The teams could use various communication and co-authoring tools for producing the written offer collaboratively, but they could meat also face-to-face if they want. The teams deliver the final version of their offer into the shared space, and the Coordination team collects them and arranges a face-to-face meeting with the customers to discuss the offers with them and to take into account their wishes and comments (e.g., are the suggested topics and services the ones that the customers want to be designed; do they have any special additions and wishes on the content of the teams’ work). The Coordination team collects the comments, revises the offers based on them, and delivers instructions to each team in a written format through the shared space for carrying out the task.

The second phase consists of a Coordination team assigning the sub-problems to teams, by revising the team offers and delivering instructions to each team in a written format through the shared space for carrying out the task, based on the comments and wishes from the customer. The teams start focusing and planning how to conduct their study. The teams use, e.g., web-based brainstorming tools at this phase for creating ideas for their study. The collected ideas are copied into a shared virtual space as a starting point for further work. The teams should use discourse forums or work coordination tools to make decisions about how to coordinate their work: how to decide what topics to concentrate on in their project work; who will do what; how to share ideas and information, what is the timetable of the teams’ work, how to comment on the written drafts of the project report during the process etc. In the next phase, the teams search for information from existing knowledge sources and from the customers, e.g., by interviews, joining and shadowing experts in their tasks, and collecting background information from the organization.  All knowledge is collected into a shared virtual space in the form of text notes and various kinds of files that can be re-arranged, annotated and linked with each other.

Based on all the collected knowledge, the teams construct a shared research report, which is constantly revised collaboratively in the shared virtual space. Facilitators, customers and separate teams also comment on each other’s drafts and share ideas and information sources throughout the project according to agreed timetable and task allocation. The Coordination team is responsible for controlling that the teams follow the timetable, by structuring and following the working process and sharing of knowledge using various tools in the shared space. The virtual space should include tools for structuring and organizing the various working phases, deadlines and milestones to support the joint virtual process. In the last phase, teams give their presentations about their solution in a common face-to-face meeting; all the presentations are also videotaped and saved in the shared virtual space. In addition, the teams provide their final written reports for the customers and publish them also in the shared virtual space, where they get final evaluative feedback from the customers and facilitators. Throughout the phases, the Coordination team supervises the teams and the Research team follows the process by questionnaires and interviews to study and report team awareness and project management issues. Both teams also present their experiences and evaluations to all participants at the end of the course.

Critical features/Requirements:

The critical feature in the course is the success of the very challenging virtual team work. It should be properly organized and supported, which also requires that the technology is working well and without serious errors.

Rationale:

The team work in the course is organized following a Virtual Project Learning and Research Model (developed by the instructors) that describes expert-like virtual work by certain phases (Defining, Planning, Executing and Delivering) and team/partner responsibilities (Virtual teams, Coordination team, Research team, Facilitators and Customers)

Research hypotheses:

Students’ own authentic experience to participate in virtual multidisciplinary team work supports the development of their understanding and skills of such practices.

Related tools and artifacts:

Discendum Optima network environment (http://www.discendum.com/english/) has been used as a collaborative learning environment in previous courses. The system provides versatile tools for content production and management. The working areas can be structured in a hierarchical folder structure. One good feature is a possibility to combine, in the same folder, various kinds of areas and functionalities: editable web-pages, links to files, discussion forums etc. However, the structure of the system and moving between tools and areas is somewhat complicated. No easy tools for following what is happening in the database and who is participating in the same course. The linking and rearrangement of artifacts and working spaces is clumsy or not possible.

Visions for future: Virtual collaboration is carried out in a shared virtual space, involving, e.g., project and process management tools, shared document development, and data-analysis tools for interviews, questionnaires and video data. Mobile devices are used for data collection at the client organizations and for accessing guidelines or communication via the course database. Further, web-based brainstorming or videoconferencing tools are used for team interaction in addition to face-to-face meetings.

Making of:

This scenario is based on a course run in the autumn of 2005 and probably will be run again within one or two years. The course in the autumn of 2005 was followed by the above authors. Student teams were interviewed during the course and students were asked to fill in pre- and post- questionnaires on the evaluations of the course and on their expectations as well as their personal evaluations of the outcomes of the course. The teachers were interviewed after the course and they have reviewed the scenario. These have all had an impact on writing the current version of the scenario. 

References:

Marttiin, P., Lehto, J., Nyman, G. (2002)  Understanding and Evaluating Collaborative Work in Multi-site Software Projects - A Framework and Preliminary Results. In the Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'02), Vol. 1 (pp. 23-32). IEEE Computer Society. Available at: http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2002/1435/01/14350023.pdf

Marttiin, P., Nyman, G., Takatalo, J. &  Lehto, J. A. (2004). Learning virtual project work. In J. Cordeiro & J. Filipe (Eds.), Computer supported activity coordination. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computer Supported Activity Coordination, CSAC 2004 (pp.91-102). Portugal: Insticc Press. Available at: http://www-lih.univ-lehavre.fr/Intranet/proceedings/ICEIS2004/CSAC%202004/CSAC2004.pdf

Nurmi, A. &  Marttiin, P.(2005). Communication in Virtual Teams - Exploring the Patterns of Communication in Virtual Learning Environment Tool. In E. Hustad, B.E. Munkvold, K. Rolland, L.S. Flak (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia, IRIS 28, 6-9 August, 2005, Kristiansand, Norway. Available: http://www.hia.no/iris28/Docs/IRIS2028-1062.pdf.