Teamwork Through Team Building: Face-to-Face to Online

Abstract

This article describes the ways the authors incorporated team-building activities into our online business writing courses by interrogating the ways that kinesthetic learning translates into the electronic realm. The authors review foundational theories of team building, including Cog's Ladder and Tuckman's Stages, and offer sample exercises they have converted. The authors show how the medium affects the exercises, how the choices made as teachers affect the exercises, and how they adjusted to meet the needs of their students. The authors argue that teamwork most successfully occurs after team building, and too often this team building is lacking in online environments.

Developing a model of conflict in virtual learning communities in the context of a democratic pedagogy

“…In these studies, the relationships between group size and collaborative elements, such as communication, coordination, trust, competition and group effectiveness, were all found to be possible influences on the occurrence of conflict (Gabriel & Griffiths, ; Hjertø, ; Kollock, ). When conflict emerges, Staggers, Garcia and Nagelhout () and Thomas () refer to issues related to the resolution of conflict and comment that over time students often tend to develop a conflict management style, such as accommodating, avoiding, competition, collaboration, compromise and forcing.…”

Game Design Tactics for Teaching Technical Communication in Online Courses

“…A second important finding we extracted from this course that we find broadly relevant to the field of technical communication is a focus on team-based writing and editing. Team-based assignments are not unusual in online technical communication courses; in fact, there is a good deal of literature explaining how team-based projects and writing assignments can be successfully used in online coursework (e.g., Staggers et al., 2008; Tillery & Nagelhout, 2017). However, there is less research available that focuses on building teams comprised of interdisciplinary majors and balancing internal and external resources to allow these teams to complete game-based or other procedurally intensive types of writing assignments.…”

Building Effective Virtual Learning Teams Through Enhanced Team Processes

“…Rather, a conflict has been viewed as a significant component of team dynamics (Liu et al, 2008) because team processes are not unchanging social interaction patterns (Tseng & Ku, 2011). In the virtual learning team, conflicts could relate to the work of the team itself or the roles and responsibilities assigned to team members within the team (Staggers et al, 2008).…”