Abstract
A tide of changes with technological advances at its center has allowed more efficient and productive synchronous and asynchronous collaborations among dispersed individuals across the globe in recent years. Working effectively in virtual teams of individuals with diverse backgrounds is thus critical for students to succeed in the 21st century. However, relevant training for international collaboration is lacking in the higher education system. The research team examined data from a project aimed to heighten students’ multidisciplinary and multicultural competencies via a team-based, international eTournament organized in 2019 and enhanced and repeated in early 2020 featuring the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. Students were teamed up according to a mechanism, to ensure diversity in each virtual team and mimic the real practice in many workplaces. A two-stage “strategize-play” approach was deployed with activities carried out entirely online. Team members first got to know each other, built up their teams and formulated their strategies for the next stage. In the second stage, the virtual teams competed with one other on a gamified learning platform called PaGamO by answering questions related to the SDGs. About 240 students (2019) and 420 students (2020) participated. Various sets of quantitative and qualitative data were collected, including student chat histories, focus group interviews, data analytics from PaGamO recording how the students progressed in the game, as well as the pre- and post-game surveys. This article focuses on the chat histories of students from the top-5 and bottom-5 teams of the 2019 and 2020 eTournaments. The results provide evidence that the high performing teams took a different gaming approach from the low performing teams in such areas as team building and game strategy deployment.
Highlights
“Wicked problems” in the 21st century, referred by Ritchey (2013) as characterized by “sets of complex, interacting issues evolving in a dynamic social context” (p.2) with reference to the “10 criteria” set by Rittle and Webber (1973), are unavoidable to mankind
How Diversified Online Teams Worked to Excel peoples across disciplines and boundaries to tackle, and those efforts can be facilitated with modern technology
There is a need to help students develop online teamwork skills, when they do not have the luxury of picking their own teammates and have to work closely with unfamiliar members of diverse backgrounds
Summary
“Wicked problems” in the 21st century, referred by Ritchey (2013) as characterized by “sets of complex, interacting issues evolving in a dynamic social context” (p.2) with reference to the “10 criteria” set by Rittle and Webber (1973), are unavoidable to mankind. Since 2016, the authors of this article have been aware that the trend of “working from home” via remote collaboration has resulted in multidisciplinary, multicultural, technologysupported work-teams becoming a norm in global businesses. It appears that the impact of this norm in work practices on teaching and learning at universities are not yet widespread (Gibson, 2012). Participating teachers teamed up to address the pressing need for equipping university students with the abilities to tackle global challenges in academically and culturally diverse teams, leveraging a set of virtual environments for collaboration across long distances (Cagiltay et al, 2015)
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