Abstract
Our digital and geographically distributed society faces great challenges nowadays in managing communication between people—who in most cases—have never met each other before. This is particularly relevant for institutions working with peers that interact in remote environments where team collaboration is an essential driver of strategic innovations, and which stresses the need to explore different techniques to enable teamwork and synergy between those—unknown—digital peers. Training students and employees to be able to manage the challenges that result from this kind of work become increasingly important. Therefore, the development of online assessments is mandatory to encourage virtual participation and teamwork analysis in order to boost objectivity and mark the outcomes of teamwork. Following a summary of the most challenging aspects that remote teams face, this chapter describes how the self, and peer-assessment strategies defined by Willcoxson can be successfully replicated in geographically decentralized teams using online tools. They can be used to develop team dynamics to accurately assess individuals’ contributions to teams, and also project planning and resourcing. The concept is determined by the transparency of team profiles and the definition of roles within the remote teams to encourage high responsiveness of all members. Conclusively, the evaluation approach should be targeted to be used to improve effective remote teamwork and also develop planning abilities, as well to measure whether the collaboration and communication executed virtually were truly successful. We have applied and evaluated our approach during a Massive Open Online Course where the participants learned about effective virtual teamwork strategies. About 3000 participants were enrolled in the course, about 50% of them have been active in the course. The course ran over 4 weeks and included a hands-on task that had to be solved in a virtual team.
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Chujfi, S., Traifeh, H., Staubitz, T., Refaie, R., Meinel, C. (2021). Exploring Collaboration and Assessment of Digital Remote Teams in Online Training Environments. In: Babo, R., Dey, N., Ashour, A.S. (eds) Workgroups eAssessment: Planning, Implementing and Analysing Frameworks. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 199. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9908-8_2
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