“AUTHORITY SAYS …”

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Allow a multi-facetted communication of advice from local discussions to remote teams during or after tutorial.

Context:

Global learning teams need instruction. Therefore, local teams engage in local, face-to-face tutorials. Sometimes the global virtual teams hold synchronous textually or visually supported computer-mediated tutorials involving all tutor and team members in order to achieve a GLOBAL RESOLUTION. However, such tutorials are difficult to coordinate on a regular basis in large learning communities. Therefore, tutors’ advice from a local tutorial needs to be mediated to the remote team. However, breakdowns in the remote teams’ understanding of the local tutors comments may occur.

Breakdown:

Due to a hierarchical orientation towards authority, members of a local team might not object to what a tutor advises in a local tutorial, even though students did not understand the instructions. Face techniques keep the students from clarifying their understanding with the tutors. Instead they simply accept the recommendations and do what they think best fits the tutors’ expectations. However, in the case of remote collaborative learning, local students have to mediate the conclusions of tutorials. It can happen that the local teams avoid the mediation and discussion of the local instructors’ comments ether because they were not understood or because the conclusion is not to the local teams liking but they did not object. The remote team is unaware or does not agree to the recommendation given by the local tutor, which disables the global team to constructively and collaboratively discuss their next steps in the design project collaboratively.

Problem:

How do you support the global virtual teams’ awareness of instructions from both remote and local tutors?

Forces:

Being unaware of the local and remote tutor’s instructions leads to problems in the coordination of remote design learning activities and the management of the projects area under discussion, which can cause misunderstandings and breakdowns among the distributed local teams in cross-cultural computer-supported collaborative design learning. A local team might not be able to communicate synchronously with the remote tutor and is uncertain about the remote tutor’s opinion. Hence the instructions from remote tutors need to be mediated to the local teams

Solution:

Allow tutors and students seperatly to post instructional advice from face-to-face tutorials to the INTERNATIONAL HOME during or after each local discussion group.

The tutor posts the comments during the face-to-face tutorial or shortly thereafter. Ideally, the tutor annotates design representations in the DESIGN PROCESS GALLERY, which were the topic of discussion in the local tutorials. At the dame time students are able to take notes of the instructors comment on their designs. However, it is advisable to clearly distinguish from students and tutors comments in the collaboration of hierarchical oriented cultures.

Why:

When two local teams with a collective community orientation collaborate, keeping the social harmony in the global virtual team is very important. If those local teams show a strong hierarchical orientation and bond to dignify and follow the opinions of the tutors the harmony can easily be disturbed if the advises from the tutors differ. In international collaboration direct and explicit advises from tutors reduce misunderstandings. Moreover, students in hierarchical learning situations expect explicit guidance from the instructor. Nevertheless, if instructions were not understood the student would not speak up in order to keep face. Moreover, students use English as a common language in the global communication. English might not be their first language and hence local tutorials might be conducted in their local language. This gives rise to possible errors in the translation and interpretation of the instructor’s recommendations. Having the instructional advice explicitly articulated in English or ideally as annotation to a design representation improves the discussion among non-native speakers enormously.

As all instructions are displayed in the INTERNATIONAL HOME the local tutor also becomes aware of the remote tutors suggestions and can monitor past advises. This minimises unnecessary conflicting or inconsistent scaffolding. Conflicting advices may be stimulating especially in creative projects at times, but in international distributed learning environments it can lead to disproportionably long delays in the design process. Students have difficulties to schedule additional synchronous discussions to re-establish common ground before the next tutorial would be due.

Resulting Context:

Codes Instruct Tutorial:

Instruction (35) Process (25) Feedback (23) Understanding (20) Schedule (19) Information (18) Milestone (18) Opinion (17) Task (17) Representation (17)

Clarify (26) Share (22) Monitor (22) Summarize (21) Check (19) Explain (19) Organize (19) Structure (19) Scaffold (19) Assign (18) Exchange (16)

Breakdown in Design Scope highest in tutorials

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