Beyond “group work”: an integrated approach to support collaboration in engineering education

Background: Working effectively in a collaborative team is not only an outcome required by ABET but also one that scholars and practitioners recognize as necessary for being a successful professional engineer. Technology-based solutions hold promise for supporting collaboration; however, research has shown that technology alone is not sufficient to develop students’ collaborative skills. The authors created a combined pedagogical and technological environment—Google Drive Environment for Collaboration (GDEC)—to support collaborative problem-solving during a semester-long team undergraduate human factor engineering design project. The environment uniquely used an “off-the-shelf” tool to implement collaborative scripts to take advantage of the affordances offered by the cloud-based collaboration technology environment that may contribute positively toward learning and collaboration. We examined the following research questions:What is the relationship between the use of an online collaboration environment and student learning outcomes?What is the relationship between the use of an online collaboration environment and student collaboration skills? We used individual and per team collaborative contributions to GDEC as the independent measure of collaboration, and project scores, homework, and exam scores as dependent variables to show evidence of student learning. GDEC contributions were collected for the three project phases and regressed to student learning measures. Pre/poststudent collaboration skills were measured using the Dimensions of Teamwork Survey. Student open-ended responses to per phase surveys were analyzed for additional evidence of collaborative skills and use of the GDEC environment. Results: Regression analyses clustered by group showed statistically significant relationships between:Individual student contributions to the collaborative environment and homework and project and second exam scores. Pre- to post collaboration skill scores on all Dimensions of Teamwork scales increased; however, the differences were not statistically significant. Conclusions: We argue these results are promising as the combination of pedagogical strategies with the readily available off-the-shelf technology tools used to create GDEC and can be easily replicated. Further, student comments indicated they found the GDEC environment easy to use and effective, and they intended to use similar tools for future collaborative activities. © 2016, The Author(s).