CyberGRID: Teaching and experiencing international teamwork through virtual environment

Abstract

An increasing number of firms are outsourcing products and services from international vendors. Educators should prepare students with knowledge and abilities to participate in this everlasting global collaboration. However, teaching international teamwork and giving students international experiences is always a challenging task, not only because of geographic distances of global teams, but also the high expense of sending students aboard. Virtual environment, which is widely implemented in game development, offers an innovative technology solution for geographically distributed collaborations. This proposed teaching exploration aims at utilizing an engineering virtual environment, CyberGRID, as a tool to teach global project management and cross-cultural teamwork for undergraduate students in Hong Kong. One undergraduate course will adopt CyberGRID as the media to deliver the global project management theories and form a collaboration with seven foreign institutions from US, Finland, India, Netherlands, Turkey, and Italy. Therefore, the proposed project will offer students a unique opportunity to incubate and develop discoveries and knowledge with their foreign peers under an international context. At the same time, the students' communication skills in English will be significantly improved.