Work In Progress: Implementing Team Projects in Online Courses - Balancing Individual Responsibility and Team Collaboration

Anoop Grewal; Haolin Zhu; David Taylor

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: First-Year Programs Division Technical Session 13: Work-in-Progress Postcard Session #2
Page Count: 8
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41705
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/41705
Download Count: 269

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Dr. Haolin Zhu earned her BEng in Engineering Mechanics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and her Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University, with a focus on computational solid mechanics. Dr. Zhu is a Senior Lecturer of the freshman engineering education team in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU) and the recipient of the Fulton Outstanding Lecturer Award. In this role, she focuses on designing the curriculum and teaching in the freshman engineering program and the mechanical engineering program. She is also the Co-Director of the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP) at ASU. In this role, she focuses on student support and tracking, curriculum, program requirements, as well as programming for current students in GCSP. Dr. Zhu was also involved in the ASU ProMod project, the Engineering Projects in Community Service program, the Engineering Futures program, the Global Freshman Academy/Earned Admission Program, and the ASU Kern Project. She was a part of the team that designed a largely team and activity based online Introduction to Engineering course. She has also co-developed two unique MOOCs, Introduction to Engineering and Perspectives on Grand Challenges for Engineering for the Global Freshman Academy/ASU Earned Admission Program. Her Ph.D. research focuses on multi-scale multiphase modeling and numerical analysis of coupled large viscoelastic deformation and fluid transport in swelling porous materials, but she is currently interested in various topics in the field of engineering education, such as innovative teaching pedagogies for increased retention and student motivation; innovations in non-traditional delivery methods, incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset in the engineering curriculum and its impact. She has published over 30 papers and presented at various conferences about her work.

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David Taylor Arizona State University

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Abstract

This Work in Progress paper will describe a structure for online projects and a team formation process to address some of the challenges in implementing design projects for teams of online students. These challenges include time zone differences, scheduling constraints for virtual meetings, varying levels of backgrounds and motivation, and team membership changes due to students withdrawing from class.

In an attempt to address these challenges in the online Introduction to Engineering course, offered at Arizona State University, a ‘robotic swarm project’ was developed and implemented, which involves each team member designing an individual mobile robot with a specific function and the team coordinating their robots together to accomplish a collective task of their choice. This project balances team collaboration and coordination with individual responsibilities and its modular nature also makes it easy to implement for team members not located in the same place or time zone. In this paper, the details of this project and how it helps overcome the online teamwork challenges will be discussed. We will also describe a team formation process, where students are allowed to select their own teams and have control over the membership as the project progresses. Plans for future work to assess the efficacy of this project structure and team formation process will be discussed as well.

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Grewal, A., & Zhu, H., & Taylor, D. (2022, August), Work In Progress: Implementing Team Projects in Online Courses - Balancing Individual Responsibility and Team Collaboration Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41705