Communication and Collaborative Learning in a Cross-Atlantic Design Course.

The authors' activities in co-teaching an engineering design course across the Atlantic, at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA, and at Delft University of Technology (DUT), the Netherlands, at the same time, required the use of information and communication tools for communication and collaboration purposes between students and between instructors and students. This paper analyzes the overseas communication and collaboration processes among students and instructors, and their implications for learning. A theoretical framework was used for collaborative learning and for stimulating active participation, for analyzing observations and for translating results to a broader theoretical framework. In practice, it meant that the authors experimented among other variables with group compositions and with instructor role descriptions. It is concluded that many of the techniques mentioned in literature did enhance collaboration and learning between students, but that intense communication with overseas instructors is still a major stumbling block. (Contains 10 references, 2 tables, and 5 figures.) (Author)