Develop Models for Global and Virtual Teams of Instructors, Advisors, and Students

Work Package Number: 
WP.4
Work Package Type: 
Development
Start (month number): 
7
End (month number): 
12
Duration (in months): 
6
Related assumptions and risks (Max. 400 characters): 

Assumptions are (1) course delivery is jointly done by the members of the consortium, with students taking some face-to-face courses and others via E-Learning taught from other members, (2) Students will work in virtual teams with other remote students, and (3) Students theses will be jointly supervised by EU and non-EU supervisors. The key challenge is developing and managing virtual teams.
Description of workpackage (Max. 2000 characters): 

This workpackage is closely linked to WP3 where e-Learning technologies will be investigated to facilitate collaborative learning in a virtual learning environment allowing students and staff from different countries to work together. It is a recognized phenomenon that real world software engineering projects are delivered by multi-national global teams and involves engineers and customers working in distributed locations. The larger phenomenon is termed “virtual enterprises”. Such virtual team working is greatly facilitated by collaborative technologies such as mailing lists, groupware (shared applications, conferencing tools, forums, etc) and other web-based social networking technologies.

In addition, specific virtual environments to support distributed software engineering teams have been developed, such as Saros (http://www.saros-project.org/) based on a plugin to Eclipse which supports distributed collaborative editing, review, and party programming and GitHub (https://github.com/) which supports social distributed coding, ideal for collaborative software development. Both Saros and git-hub are used by distributed open source software development project teams. This work package will investigate the various modes of team working relevant to distributed software engineering and the means of supporting virtual teams via collaborative technologies with the aim of using these within the Masters modules to ensure that students have experience of virtual team working. Given the international composition of the project members, there will be excellent opportunities to compose distributed teams across the participating universities. Additionally, models and tools for staff-student interaction, collaboration and supervision will be selected to allow remote staff to teach and supervise students, sharing EU knowledge and expertise with students from non-EU partners.
Deliverables – outputs / outcomes: