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Teacher tools

This collection of Teacher Tools aims to offer support for teachers who participate in the Beezr project. As a collaborative resource Teacher Tools will enable lecturers to find and share ideas, tips and tricks with other teachers for running virtual team projects with their students.

Beezr Project

These Teachers Tools are part of the Beezr project. Beezr (officially named Beezr / MAB 2.0 Market Basket), is an initiative by universities from five different countries. The project is sponsored by the EU Erasmus+ fund and the participating universities are:

-    Austria: University of Applied Sciences (BFI), Vienna

-    Croatia: University of Zagreb (FOI), Varazdin, Croatia

-    Denmark: Business Academy Aarhus (BAA), Aarhus,

-    Netherlands: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), Amsterdam

-    Poland: Kozminski University, Warsaw

The aim of the project is to create a community of students, teachers, businesses and organizations focused on virtual teamwork, shared learning and creative problem solving and knowledge sharing.

Students develop professional skills for tomorrow’s globalised working environment, such as cross-cultural competences and virtual teamwork skills and being able to work effectively in international, multi-disciplinary, virtual teams. 

Virtual teamwork

In the Beezr model virtual student teams from different countries, disciplines and courses work together on research projects or business cases. Using online tools such as Skype, email, social media they work together without having to travel. This is how our students develop virtual and cross-cultural collaboration skills.

What will you find in these Teachers Tools

This toolbox offer tools to help you in three stages of the project:

  • Before your Beezr project: how to prepare and set up a virtual collaboration project?
  • During your Beezr project: how to manage virtual student teams across borders?
  • After your Beezr project: how to make the most of the outcomes of your project?

 

Attachments:

Like any project preparation is key and setting up a virtual teamwork project Involving multiple institutions and student teams requires careful planning.

In this section you will find information about how to start and prepare your Beezr Project:

•     Business Cases: working with (real-life) business cases

•     Project briefing: getting information from the company

•     Matching: finding partners and courses

•     Scheduling your Beezr Project

•     Assignments: creating student assignments

•     Scaffolding assignments

Working with (real-life) business cases

One of main goals of the Beezr project connect Higher Education with businesses, particularly Small Medium sized Enterprises. Therefore, it is important to get students to work with real-life international business cases as much as possible.

You can either find a business case in your own network or select a business case from the Beezr network. When you find a client company, you consider the business case: what is the problem, what are the challenges and opportunities?

Decide which expertise might be needed, how compatible this could be with your own courses and your students skills and expertise. Beezr aims to create a network to attract companies who are interested in international expansion, working with students and shared learning.

 

Students finding business cases

You could also get your students to come up with business cases. This works particularly well with part-time or mature students, who often work or have connections with the business community. 

This offers students the opportunity to work on business cases that they’re really interested in. It is also a great way to get students to go out and get in contact with the business world. In other words, finding clients and business cases, helps students to develop entrepreneurial and proactive behaviour.

In-work part-time students are often quite keen on bringing in business cases from their own company, organisation or industry. 

Obviously, in smaller businesses it is easier for students to get access to the owner or manager of the business. Sometimes companies are reluctant to share the necessary information for the project. In that case it might be useful to point out the mutual benefits of the project in order to get management involved: the client business will get access to professional research and advice in exchange for providing valuable learning experience.

 

Project Briefing: getting information from the company

In order to successfully carry out the project students need information from the company. In other words, there should be some type of business case or project briefing, which could vary depending on the type of project and the disciplines involved. 

It is important to make clear agreements on the information shared by the client company and that sensitive information will be treated with confidence. Some companies may require non-disclosure agreements. 

 

Example Business Information

Here is an example of the information needed from businesses for a marketing or marketing communications project. 

Project Briefing Marketing Communications

Information needed from businesses for a marketing or marketing communications project:

  • Background information: mission, vision, products/services, target markets, brief company history, current company and brand status, sales history, current marketing mix and other factors that has made the company what it is today.
  • Reason for the project (immediate cause), i.e. current issues, problems or opportunities
  • Market research objectives i.e. what kind of information needed from research or information needed for what kind of decision making, etc.
  • Business problem statement, management question, key issues
  • Project deliverables and deadlines
  • Contact persons 
  • Any other requirements or project constraints

 

Finding Partners and matching courses

Partners in the Beezr network are lecturers in the universities and colleges that participate in the Beezr network. They could help you find partners, i.e. lecturers and student teams, to match your students or course. 

 

Finding partners through the Beezr network

The Beezr network consists of a variety of partner institutions, with all types of programmes and courses. The main aim of the Beezr project is to stimulate students working together in multidisciplinary virtual teams. Matching courses and classes for a virtual teamwork project is therefore an important part of the project. See the overview of the various fields of student expertise in the BEEZR / MAB network identified so far.

 

Beezr Skills and Expertise

 

Here is an overview of the skills and expertise available in the Beezr network (Autumn 2015). More skills, disciplines and expertise will be added in the future.

 

Matching classes and courses

Multidisciplinary and international teamwork are the key elements of the Beezr project. Therefore a multitude of combinations and matches of courses are possible, e.g. Entrepreneurship – Market Research, Technology- Project management, Multimedia – Marketing Communications etc. etc.

The Beezr model is suitable for courses that have:

  • Project based learning incorporated in their programmes with clear project deliverables, preferably for real life external clients;
  • An international orientation, e.g. taught in English, intercultural course components;
  • Possibility of multidisciplinary collaboration and virtual teamwork;
  • A course schedule of between 10 – 15 weeks (semester), which is reasonably flexible, so that activities to allow matching with other academic calendars and project events, e.g. shared project kick-off date and final project presentations.

Class size could be between 15 – 30 students, but collaboration between teams (i.e. asymmetric teams) unequal in numbers is workable.

 

Things to keep in mind

There are a few things that can make planning a virtual teamwork project challenging and which should be tackled from the outset:

  • Matching course schedules and academic calendars can be quite a puzzle. Try to get a clear overview of the dates for holidays and exam periods. Keep in mind that there might also be other periods when students have no classes and might have self-study periods.
  • Compatibility of course objectives and deliverables: exchanging course descriptions or a syllabus early on is a good way to familiarize partners with the content of each other’s courses. This way it’s easier to agree on project deliverables depending on the assignment or business case.
  • Communication between lecturers is a key success factor for any project, so try to arrange frequent and periodic Skype meetings. 

Defining your Beezr Project is not just scheduling the different student tasks. The best thing to do is to start by defining the scope and depth of the project. Therefore, it’s important to start early and work in close consultation with your partners. Plan sessions where you could brainstorm about project outcomes, student tasks and learning objectives,

If you work with an external client, a company or sponsor, you and your partner should discuss and agree on the following:

Step 1: General scope and depth of the project

Step 2: Project objectives and deliverables

Step 3: Breaking down the project scope and work distribution

Step 4: Delivery dates, deadlines, milestones

 

Step 1: General scope and depth of the project

First of all, take the information collected during the Business Case Briefing. Consider which parts of the project your students and which parts of the project other student teams would carry out, based on the content of your courses. The Beezr model aims at bringing together multiple disciplines, but you could just focus on the content or subject of your own course and see how this fits in with the project.

 

 Step 2: Project objectives and deliverables

A good starting point is the project description and deliverables: what exactly is required for the project? This information is important to get the Big Project Picture and not only the scope and tasks of your students (which is step 3).  

 

Step 3: Breaking down the project scope and work distribution

After agreeing on the project objectives and the deliverables, the project scope has to be broken down to the main project tasks and linked with the respective Participating team, e.g.:

 

Step 4: Delivery dates, deadlines, milestones

Finally, you have to schedule all tasks and milestones. On the next page is an example of how a marketing and communications project between Croatian, Dutch and Danish student virtual teams was scheduled. Once you’ve agreed on the content of the project you could place the activities into a schedule. See example. Keep in mind that it’s important to keep your planning as flexible as possible

 

 

Amsterdam

FOI

BAA

Wk 1

2 feb

Start semester HVA 1st half

 

 

Wk 2

9 feb

 

Company profile + problem definition

 

Wk 3

16 feb

A’dam students make introduction video

Informing the students about the project

 

Wk 4

23 feb

VACATION

 

 

Wk 5

2 mar

 

Start semester FOI

Start semester BAA

Wk 6

9 mar

A’dam students deliver briefing with questions for company

FOI students visit company with briefing made by Dutch and Danes (12th March)

BAA students deliver briefing with questions for company

Wk 7

16 mar

 

 

 

Wk 8

23 mar

A’dam students present research proposal

 

BAA students present research proposal

Wk 9

30 mar

A’dam students exam

 

 

 

Wk 10

6 apr

 

 

 

Wk 11

13 apr

Start semester HVA 2nd half

 

 

Wk 12

20 apr

 

 

 

Wk 13

27 apr

A’dam students deliver input for business plan

 

BAA students deliver input for business plan

Wk 14

4 may

VACATION

FOI students start financial planning

 

Wk 15

11 may

VACATION

 

 

Wk 16

18 may

 

FOI students deliver reflections on Beezr and present experience to other in PPP course

 

Wk 17

25 may

 

 

 

Wk 18

1 june

 

 

 

Wk 19

8 june

 

 

 

Wk 20

15 june

A’dam students present marketing plan & market research report

 

 

Wk 21

22 june

 

 

 

Wk 22

29 june

 

Finishing of business plan (for a company)

 

 

 

 

 

Once you have reached agreement with your partner lecturers on division of tasks (i.e. which team will be responsible for which project deliverables), you can start defining the assignments for your students. This should fit into your own course programme and course objectives. 

Make sure you agree with your partner lecturer when (i.e. deadline and milestones) and how your students will have to deliver their assignments.

The project assignment has to contain general project information in order to show the Big Picture of the project to your students. Your students will not only have to concentrate on their individual tasks they have to fulfil, but also see the linkages with other student groups with other expertise.

General items of the project assignment will be:

  • Assignment situation and context
  • Project objectives and deliverables
  • Project organization
  • Schedule with broken-down tasks

 The individual items of the project assignment will be:

  • Learning objectives
  • Assessment criteria

In the next few pages you'll find an example of an assignment for a Marketing course at BAAA (Denmark) and Hva (the Netherlands) and a Business Plan course at FOI (Croatia):

  • Initial situation and context
  • Project objectives and deliverables
  • Project task overview
  • Project organization
  • Learning objectives and Assessment criteria

 

Initial situation and context

Initial situation / Problem description:

Agroposta is a family owned and run business, specialized in the farming and collecting of organic plants and fruits and produce a range of natural, great tasting fruit and plant based cordials – refreshing non-alcoholic drink.

Agroposta aims to slowly expand their business. In Dutch market they have already been present, but they still have no distributors for the product in Denmark.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Project objectives and deliverables

Project objectives:

Market research and marketing strategy for improving market performance of Agroposta in Denmark and the Netherlands

Final deliverable of the whole project:

Agroposta needs Market analyses of Dutch and Danish market and a projection of future business flows to evaluate business opportunity.

 

  

Project task overview

Project Tasks

  • Conducting Market research
  • Analysing Research findings
  • Formulating Marketing Strategy
  • Planning Marketing Tactics
  • Report writing
  • Preparing client presentation

 

 

 

 

 

 

Project organization

Several student groups will have to work together, but not all of them. Therefore, it is highly recommended to prepare an organization chart to show which groups from which partners will work together. Please take note that it is not necessary that each partner has the same number of students and groups. In order to facilitate communication between the student groups, each group should nominate one Group Leader who will be the main contact person for the other groups involved in the same project. 

The learning objectives and assessment criteria will significantly differ between the partners. Therefore, it is recommended to have individual sections for each partner. An example of this individual section is given below:

Learning objectives:

While working on this  project students on both sides will develop the following skills and  competencies:

  • Professional Expertise: deepen their knowledge and research skills in marketing, marketing communications, consumer behaviour and culture
  • Team working skills: the students will face the challenges of working in a virtual, international, cross-cultural,  multidisciplinary team
  • Cross cultural communication skills: students will research, analyse and compare the role of culture in consumer behaviour, buying behaviour and media consumption in two countries.

Assessment

Students will be assessed by their own lecturers using their own grading system and course assessment criteria will be applied. However, together lecturers will assess team performance on:

  • Professional expertise: does your work meet the industry’s professional marketing and communication standards?
  • Innovation: does your work reflect vision, strategic thinking and creativity?
  • Communication skills: have you been able to present your work in a professional and persuasive manner?
  • Intercultural sensitivity: does your work and team performance reflect adequate development of intercultural competences
  • Teamwork skills: have you been able to work as an effective virtual team, where all team members contributed to the team results in a positive working atmosphere?
  • Result orientation: has your team been able to meet all milestones and deadlines, with regular progress updates?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Scaffolding assignments

Scaffolding is a way of structuring and sequencing a complex assignment to support your students in their learning process. It helps students to understand new content and develop new skills, building on previous and existing knowledge and skills. 

If your assignment is complex and extends over a longer period of time, then you should break it down into more manageable pieces. A good tool to manage this is Trello.

Scaffold learning helps to feel students more successful when doing smaller tasks and step by step completing the entire project. It is particularly useful for learning through intensive interaction and collaboration, such as virtual teamwork projects.

Structuring and sequencing assignments

There are several ways of scaffold learning. You could break down the project into stages and give the students specific tasks. The student teams carry out specific parts of the assignment, present their findings in class and are given feedback on their performance. This way students keep building on the knowledge they already know, helps to understand new content and achieve the next step in the project.

One way of doing this, is by having the students submit and present status reports. Each status reports focuses on a particular element of the project and serves as a building block for the project as a whole. The teams are briefed, carry out the task, present their status report in class and are given feedback on their performance.

The students are provided with support before, during and after the task:

  • Before: giving specific instructions for the task, explaining theories and models, pointing out recommended resources
  • During: checking on progress, answering questions, giving guidance and general nudging students into the right direction
  • After: peer review, providing constructive feedback on status report presentations, evaluating and assessing performance,

Here is an example of a Beezr project broken down into status reports and project updates. Each week students were given instructions for the next status report, which they had to present in class for review. The reports were posted on the course website and the teams received feedback. It’s important to give detailed instructions for specific tasks in class.

 

International Comparison and Evaluation Report

In the International Comparison and Evaluation Report (ICE) students analyse the differences and similarities between the countries they've worked with. They also look back on the project and reflect on what they've learned from the project. 

The purpose of this assignment is to enhance the students’ learning experience by having them reflect on lessons learned. Together with all team members, they should analyse, compare various aspects of their project, and reflect on their own competency and skills development. For you as a lecturer these reports will be of great value, as they will give you a clear and profound insight into the course learning outcomes and your students’ learning experience. 

Formulating the assignment

Together with your partner lecturers you should decide which aspects are most relevant for the students to analyse. That could be, e.g.:

  • Cultural differences
  • Working methods and approaches
  • Local differences in trends, such as market, industry, society etc.,

Student virtual teams could either write the report together, or one team could take the lead. The assignment could be delivered in various forms, from a written report, slideshow presentation to a website or an infographic.

  

Planning teams

Before you start the project you have to agree with your partner lecturers on the number and the size of your student teams.

Size and number of teams

It isn't always necessary to have the exact same number of teams on each side. Some student teams, particularly senior or mature teams, are able to work with more than one team.

For instance, in previous versions of the project part-time mature marketing students responsible for a marketing strategy have been able to work with two or three creative teams with the same brief. You could even turn it into a contest where the best team wins the prize.

 

In this section we will look into how to manage your Beezr Project. Planning and preparation is important and once you've started, you have to make sure that your students are on track with their project work and keep in touch with their international team members.

You also have to keep in touch with your partner lecturers and monitor the project's progress.

In this section we’ll discuss:

  • Kicking off your Beezr Project
  • Virtual Teamwork Skills introduced in class
  • Getting students to contact each other
  • Monitoring progress of Beezr Project
  • Final Presentations

The best way to start your Beezr Project is by arranging a live joint kick-off. That could be done virtually, e.g. using Skype or Google Hangouts.

However, because of different timetables (e.g. between full-time and part-time students) and time zones, this can be quite difficult to schedule. Yet, you could have parts of your class conducted online, so that the students meet their team members. Alternatively, you could create a web lecture or webinar as a part of the Kick-off.

 

What should be in the kick-off?

The Kick-off should cover the following topics:

  • Assignment instructions
  • Scope and depth of the research
  • Learning objectives
  • Planning
  • Team formation
  • Project management information (how do you expect your students to work together with the other students?) This could be brief or in an extended version.
  • Competency development: (virtual) team work skills, intercultural awareness etc.
  • Assessment criteria and number point or ECs to be gained 

 

 Forming teams at the start

Try to form teams right at the start of the project, preferably at the kick-off session of the project. Make it into a teambuilding activity, e.g. by discussing how to match teams by making differences in role qualities productive, based on relevant teamwork models. (e.g. Belbin Team role model).

 

Discuss teamwork skills development

This is the time to introduce the topic of teamwork skills and to get the students to reflect on this. Discuss topics such as:

- Belbin Team role model: Meredith Belbin identified nine archetypical roles in teams (www.belbin.com). Get students to take an online Team Role test and reflect on their team work orientation: Which of team roles do they usually play in teams? Who will play which role in this project team? What are their learning objectives in this project?

- Team development: discuss the dynamics of team development. What have the students experienced in previous project teams? How will they use their lessons learned in this project. A useful model to use is Bruce Tuchman’s model of team development whereby teams go through the five stages:

  1. Forming
  2. Storming
  3. Norming
  4. Performing
  5. Mourning

 

Learn more: 

Introducing Virtual Teamwork skills in class

At the start of the project you should introduce the development of virtual teamwork skills. The best time to introduce this topic is at the first project session, the kick-off. 

 

How to introduce the development of virtual team work skills in class?

You could give a short presentation on virtual teams, followed by a discussion in class. Students may already have some experience in working in virtual teams. In that case you use that experience to open up the discussion.

Which topics to cover in your presentation?

Topics to include in your presentation on virtual teamwork skills are:

  • What are virtual teams and how do they operate?
  • Explain why virtual teamwork skills are so important
  • Point out some of the pitfalls of virtual teams
  • Tips on how to work effectively in virtual teams

Follow up

Make sure you follow up on your presentation with a group discussion. You could ask each team to carry out a SWOT analysis, analysing the team’s strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats as a virtual team. On the basis of their analysis the teams could formulate development goals and learning objectives. This will also help students to reflect on their professional development and stimulate an open and healthy team atmosphere.

Virtual Team work simulation

A good way to have the students experience what it’s like to work in a virtual team is to set up a virtual teamwork simulation case. Students have to carry out a task whilst being in different locations, without face to face contact; only Skype, email, phone or other channels.

Games and quizzes to activate students

There are several other tools to activate students and get them to connect with each other. For instance, Kahoot is a playful tool to create online quizzes, such as this one.

 

Getting students to contact each other

Getting students to contact other students can be difficult. In some cases, students may feel inhibited in contacting students in another country. Yet, communication is an essential part of a virtual team project. Differences in language skills and culture may also play a role. However, you should explain to the students, that this is all part of working in virtual teams.

Therefore it is extremely important that you get the students not only to establish contact with each other, but also to keep in touch with each other.

How to get students to establish contact

Here are a few tips and suggestions on how to get your students to contact other teams.

  • Obviously, make sure you get the all the correct email addresses of the students. Get both college email and private email of all students.
  • Appoint one team member as team leader or at least as the one being responsible for establishing and maintaining contact.
  • Give very specific and clear instructions about the first email. If necessary, hand-out a template and give them a strict deadline for sending it.  
  • Ask to be copied in when the students send their first email, so that you can track which student teams have sent their emails?

Introduction videos

A fun way of getting students to know each other is by getting to make videos. As a first assignment you could ask them to create videos with their tablets, laptops or smart phones in which they introduce the team.

 

Extended Project Management skills

In academic classes, there is often only very limited time to get a project started. Clear tasks are provided by the lecturer to be conducted by the students.

Real-life projects usually do not provide these clear task assignments, but the project team receives a high-level project assignment when the project starts. Before starting with developing the scope and tasks of the project, a detailed project planning is required.

The basic project information is taken from the project assignment (explained above).

Different Project Management (PM) tools can be used in order to get the project team members to the same level of understanding of the Big Project Picture. This usually includes the following steps:

Step 1: Discuss and prioritize project objectives

Step 2: Set-up the project organization (only one project manager, student group leaders as project key team members and leading their student groups as sub-teams)

Step 3: Breaking down the project scope and work distribution to the project members

Step 4: Prepare a Delivery dates, deadlines and milestones

The results of these steps are summarized in a project handbook. Students of the Master Degree Project Management and IT at the FHbfi Vienna have developed a project handbook template and a short introduction video which can be used for the kick-off workshop which can be found here.

Monitoring progress

Keeping track of your students’ progress is crucial to the success of your Beezr Project. Teams have to deliver their project deliverables in time to meet milestones and in time for handing over the project to other teams.

Frequent Project Updates

You could monitor the teams' progress by getting the students to present weekly project updates in class. Give them clear guidelines as to what you expect they should present.

If you’ve broken down the project assignment into smaller components, as part of scaffold learning, then you’ll be able to monitor their progress and support them along the way.

This also helps students to better structure and manage their workload. If you break down the assignment in smaller assignments, then it is a lot easier for the students to manage their part of the project. Obviously, you should give the students clear guidelines as to which topics should be included in their status updates.

 

Keeping in touch with your partners

Not only is it important to monitor the progress of your own students, but you also need to monitor the project in general. Therefore, it's also important to keep in touch with your partner lecturers on how student teams are working on both sides.

When your students give their weekly updates, they could share their material with their virtual team members on a shared workspace in the cloud (e.g. Moodle, SharePoint or Dropbox.com). That way you and your partner lecturer can keep track of the teams' progress. 

In your planning you should schedule regular moments of contact. As in any project issues and miscommunication between teams are likely to occur. However, if you act quickly in collaboration with your partners, then they’re usually easy to resolve.

 

Sharing project work online

It is important that the student teams share their work as much as possible, so that they can get feedback from other student teams or from their lecturers. 

Sharing online

Student teams might also agree to share work that is still in progress online. Many students find it easier to communicate via various social media platforms.  Discuss with your students which platforms and channels are suitable for sharing project information.  

Slack is an easily understandable communication tool for virtual teams. The guideline for that can be found in the course material online library in the section "Tools for Students"

Student teams should agree from the start on the platform and the frequency of they will share information online.

 

Preparing final presentations

Ideally, the final project presentations would be joint team presentations. Yet, obviously in a virtual team project that may be difficult to organise.

However, there are ways to organise presentations whereby to organise collaborative presentations. Student teams could be asked to prepare presentation material, e.g. PowerPoint slides, together. In other words, the students prepare their presentations together and then deliver them in their respective classes. Presentations could be recorded on video and integrated in to each other's presentations.

Integral presentations

Make sure that student teams not only present their own part of the project, but also include the rest of the project as whole. For instance, when presenting an advertising campaign, the marketing students should not only present the marketing strategy, but also the creative concept.

Client Company presentation

When working with business cases, inviting the client company to the presentation will certainly increase the importance of the event and add value to the presentations.

In this section you will find information on how to complete your Beezr Project. You will find information about how to close your project for your students, your partner lecturers and your business client or project sponsor.

Closing and evaluating your Beezr Project is an important phase in the project. You should document and post your evaluations, best practices and particularly your lessons learned.
Beezr will have a special gallery for displaying best practices, research findings etc. online.

In this section we’ll discuss:

  • Assessing and grading teams’ performance
  • Evaluation of your project
  • Sharing project outcomes

Assessing and grading teams

The project deliverables should be assessed and graded according to the grading system in your own programme. In other words, you apply your own grading system when you're marking your students' work. There might also be specific skills and knowledge components that are part of your course that need to be assessed and graded.

However, if possible, try to come to a common assessment of the deliverables together with your partner in the project. You could discuss the teams' performance with your fellow lecturers according to the assessment criteria that you've formulated at the start of the project. How have the teams performed according to these criteria? How have they demonstrated competency and skills development while working on the project?

The learning outcomes not only consist of acquiring theoretical knowledge and expertise, but also developing competencies and skills, such as:

  • Teamwork skills: have the student teams been able to work together as an effective team, both as a ‘physical’ team and a virtual team?
  • Intercultural competencies: have team members demonstrated a significant development of cross-cultural communication skills, and intercultural sensitivity. 
  • Result orientation: has the team been able to meet deadlines and milestones? Have they been able to give regular project updates and acted on feedback?

 

Evaluating your project

After assessing and grading the students work, you should set aside some time assessing the project. The reason why this is so important is that you learn something from running the project yourself. And the MAB Beezr network can learn something from your experience. The best way to evaluate the project is by doing this together with your partner lecturers. Use the assessment criteria that you've agreed on earlier.

Possible project evaluation topics:

  • Meeting scope, schedule, and objectives?
  • Success criteria for the outcomes for students, lecturers and client company
  • Reflection on lessons learned from the project.
  • What will you do differently on the next project based on your experience working on this project?

 

Sharing and publishing project outcomes and general course material

One of the aims of the Beezr project is to share and disseminate research findings. The Beezr project aims to become a knowledge base and expert centre for intercultural business skills and expertise.

Share your best practices

Our website www.beezr.eu offers the opportunity to showcase your best practices and share research findings from your projects.

Sharehelpful course material 

On the Beezr website you find several useful tools and information which have been prepared by Beezr lecturers and students in the past (e.g. on virtual collaboration, European business, marketing plan). http://beezr.eu/resources.

Feel free to use this material and develop this further and share your ideas. Are there any topics in your field of expertise that still need to be covered?

Join the Beezr network by contributing short and simple tools, tips and tricks, which might be very helpful for your Beezr partners who are experts in a different field.

Before you post your course material online, you may have to edit your material to make it more suitable for online publication. Furthermore, you may have to check if you have all copyrights for the content of the course material.

 

Tips and Tools: links, apps, exercises for virtual student team projects

  • www.coil.suny.edu/case-studies: the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is one of the leading international organizations focused on globally networked learning.
  • Assessing Intercultural Learning Outcomes: www.crossculturetoolkit.org: Experiential Learning Evaluation Toolkit. Rubrics for assessment of learning outcomes. It’s recommended to do a pre-assessment (e.g. D. Deardorff model, Iceberg model, Bennet model) and do a post-assessment after the collaboration, with the help of a rubric. The tool offers pre and post surveys.
  • Assessment ideas: “collect – select – reflect”, collect artifacts as evidence, assess progress (not only outcome at the end), ask students to formulate an outcome “how would you demonstrate openness?”, peer assessment.
  • Open Badges:http://oro.open.ac.uk/42038: Assessing online intercultural exchange with Open Badges. Mirjam Hauck (SUNY/COIL). Open Badges are a visual record of achievement where the following can be assessed: recognising learner achievement, driving engagement and stimulating task or course completion.
  • Sort, Reflect and Dialogue: icebreaker exercise that can be done virtually to encourage intercultural understanding. Tools: Google hangouts, google chat or Skype for video conferencing, Microsoft Office, QQ/WE CHAT, Blackboard Collaborate.
  • www.doodle.com or www.padlet.com: (alternative tool: Pinterest) tool to collaborate at a distance. Activity based on introducing yourself to the virtual team members. By choosing an image and telling a story about that image, students explain their cultural background. What does the image reflect about you? Would that be different in another culture? Alternative assignment could be: what image best reflects your culture? Students find an image, post it and tell a story about it, they share it and then others vote for it. Students can post comments, write questions and post images.
  • Other icebreaker ideas: “backpack of culture”- what artifacts or items of your culture would you put in your backpack? Why would you include that item? What does it say about your culture? Facebook video with basic questions about yourself or use photographs instead of videos.
  • Introducing yourself with videos or photos on closed FB groups: students introduce themselves by explaining where they live, study, hang out, what they like to eat, where and how they go out etc.Topics: nightlife / domestic life / food / house, living / school, study / landscape (what your country looks like).Tools for students to be autonomous
    • Moodle posting
    • Video sharing
    • Facebook sharing
    • blog commeting
  • Idea to develop intercultural sensitivity: ask students (of the non-dominant language) to say something about themselves in the language of the counter partner and use this in the video.
  • www.trello.com With this tool teams can manage projects virtually and at a distance, learning how to collaborate and work as professionals. See the Trello Guidelines. Real world usage and similar tools, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc.
  • Collaborative Research: task is comparing cultures, students collaborate on a research project and choose from a collection of topics (f.ex. labor and gender roles, relevance of religion etc.). Main research question is to find and analyse the differences and similarities.
  • Webblogs: www.newsactivist.com or www.wordpress.com Collaborative writing assignments. Students write blogs and other students react on the blogs, reference and connect. This tool enables students to collaborate on various writing assignments, such as essays, reviews, blogs etc. and comment on articles of others. Task for (reacting/commenting) student is: what argument is most convincing and why? How can this article be improved? Can you find relevant articles? This type of course or tool is especially practical for any kind of critical thinking module. Wordpress has the added advantage of including videos and slide cards and has a focus on content creation. Newsactivist is easy to use, students get to write inmediately.

 

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