A tide of changes with technological advances at its center has allowed more efficient and productive synchronous and asynchronous collaborations among dispersed individuals across the globe in recent years. Working effectively in virtual teams of individuals with diverse backgrounds is thus critical for students to succeed in the 21st century. However, relevant training for international collaboration is lacking in the higher education system. The research team examined data from a project aimed to heighten students’ multidisciplinary and multicultural competencies via a team-based, international eTournament organized in 2019 and enhanced and repeated in early 2020 featuring the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. Students were teamed up according to a mechanism, to ensure diversity in each virtual team and mimic the real practice in many workplaces. A two-stage “strategize-play” approach was deployed with activities carried out entirely online. Team members first got to know each other, built up their teams and formulated their strategies for the next stage. In the second stage, the virtual teams competed with one other on a gamified learning platform called PaGamO by answering questions related to the SDGs. About 240 students (2019) and 420 students (2020) participated. Various sets of quantitative and qualitative data were collected, including student chat histories, focus group interviews, data analytics from PaGamO recording how the students progressed in the game, as well as the pre- and post-game surveys. This article focuses on the chat histories of students from the top-5 and bottom-5 teams of the 2019 and 2020 eTournaments. The results provide evidence that the high performing teams took a different gaming approach from the low performing teams in such areas as team building and game strategy deployment.
In order to provide students with the opportunity to learn with their overseas counterparts without leaving their homes, collaborative online learning could be a way forward. Two Asian partner universities located in Hong Kong and Singapore, with the same institutional strategic goal of "Internationalization" had worked together to enrich a diverse group of (n=93) research postgraduate students (referred as 'teaching assistants' [TAs] in this paper) by organizing a joint venture on collaborative online learning during the first semester of the 2018-2019 academic year. Participating TAs in this study had different levels of prior online learning experience. A 3-week online course was developed by a team from the teaching and learning office of a leading liberal arts university in Hong Kong (U1), using a proprietary e-learning platform. Out of the 93 TAs, 11 TAs from a leading technological university in Singapore (U2) enrolled in this online course. The purpose of the 3-week online course was to provide TAs with the key teaching and learning concepts and related pedagogies for teaching undergraduates at university. These concepts were similar to the curriculum contents of the TA training courses offered by U1 and U2 respectively. The online learning platform provided a variety of learning features such as the use of videos, quizzes, graded tests, articles and online asynchronous discussion forums for participants from different parts of the world to interact with each other.
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