Assessing Interactions Among Students Geographically Dispersed During Multinational Design Projects

• Published in: Association for Engineering Education - Engineering Library Division Papers p. 24.202.1
• Main Authors: Esparragoza, Ivan E, Sheila Katherine Lascano Farak, Ocampo, Jared Roberto, Viganò, Roberto, Duque-Rivera Duque-Rivera, Jorge W, Rodriguez, Carlos A
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Atlanta American Society for Engineering Education-ASEE 15.06.2014
• Subjects: Business; Collaboration; Design engineering; Dispersion; Engineers; Information flow; Problem based learning; Social factors; Students

Assessing interactions among students geographical disperse during multinational design projectsThe new business model and global operations of many enterprises have brought new challengesfor engineers working in multinational companies. These new trends and the need of educatingworld-class engineers with global competencies have opened opportunities for new educationalmodels to expose students to international experiences to start developing those capabilities. Onepedagogical activity used to promote global competencies is the participation of students inmultinational design projects, a problem-based learning approach in an international setting,where students get immersed in the solution of an engineering design task while they work inteams and collaborate with international partners. A collaborative network of institutions fromthe Americas and Italy has developed and executed collaborative global design projects as part ofacademic experiences for their students. The main goal of these projects is to foster internationalcollaboration and to offer an opportunity to the students to develop professional skills throughinternational teamwork effort in the solution of a design problem. However, a real challenge ofthis practice has been to create an effective interaction among the students participating in thistype of projects and to maintain the flow of information and students engagement in the projectand in their learning. Therefore, this paper reports the work related to the assessment approach tomonitor students’ interaction in multinational collaborative projects. The main objectives of thisapproach are: (a) to evaluate the interaction among the students (frequency, quantity andquality); (b) to determine the value of social interaction in the flow of the interaction; (c) todetermine the impact of interaction in the development of the project.