Design Issues in a Cross‐institutional Collaboration on a Distance Education Course

Abstract

Collaborative learning has been gaining momentum as a promising pedagogy in higher education. Research on student collaboration is increasing. However, one arena is often overlooked—faculty collaboration. In this article, a cross‐institutional faculty collaboration is presented. The context is faculty collaboration on the design of an undergraduate engineering course. Specifically, this paper examines design issues encountered in the faculty collaborations associated with developing, delivering, and redesigning a senior‐level engineering design course that was taught simultaneously at two universities. This course was taught in state‐of‐the‐art distance learning classrooms. Both within class and outside class, participating students and faculty made use of a Web‐based environment that supported a variety of synchronous and asynchronous interactions. The course itself focused on team design projects and provided instruction on the engineering design process, in various specific skills needed for the students’ projects, and on how to function effectively as part of a geographically distributed engineering design team. The participating faculty members represented different backgrounds, academic disciplines, and academic cultures. Issues related to collaborations on development, delivery, and redesign are elaborated. Based on the lessons learned, suggestions for future cross‐institutional faculty collaboration in course development are provided.