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Assessing the individual acquisition of teamwork competence by exploring students’ instant messaging tools use: the WhatsApp case study

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Abstract

Nowadays, working in groups is very usual and popular in most professional environments. Thus, students, as potential workers, need to acquire teamwork competence in their educational institutions. However, when the students are working in groups, it is easy assessing their final result but not so much evaluating how each of them, individually, is developing teamwork competence. In this sense, there are several methodologies, and those with better results are the ones that explore students’ interactions in learning platforms when developing the activity/project. Taking into account the latter, students’ interactions do not only happen in a learning platform but also using other tools such as instant messaging tools. This paper explores the possibility to assess the use of instant messaging tools for the acquisition of teamwork competence, and specifically, it presents a case study about the use of WhatsApp. From the results, we can conclude that the students prefer to use instant messaging tools in teamwork activities than other interaction tools as forums; and that the employment of those tools has a positive impact in students’ grades.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by RoboSTEAM Erasmus+ KA201 Project with reference 2018-1-ES01-KA201-050939.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanics, Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering, Robotics Group, Universidad de León, Campus de Vegazana S/N, 24071, León, Spain

    Miguel Á. Conde, Francisco J. Rodríguez-Lera, Alexis Gutiérrez-Fernández & Ángel M. Guerrero-Higueras

  2. Department of Electric, Systems and Automatics Engineering, Robotics Group, Universidad de León, Campus de Vegazana S/N, 24071, León, Spain

    Francisco J. Rodríguez-Sedano

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  1. Miguel Á. Conde
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  2. Francisco J. Rodríguez-Sedano
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Correspondence to Miguel Á. Conde.

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The research study is part of the RoboSTEAM project which has been approved by the University of León ethical committee. The research has been conducted according to ethical standards.

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Participant consent was obtained prior to undertaking this study. Students volunteered on an individual basis and indicated their agreement to participate in the study by a consent form. All students were informed that their participation was completely voluntary, that they can cancel their consent when they decide it and that all collected information would be anonymous and confidential.

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Conde, M.Á., Rodríguez-Sedano, F.J., Rodríguez-Lera, F.J. et al. Assessing the individual acquisition of teamwork competence by exploring students’ instant messaging tools use: the WhatsApp case study. Univ Access Inf Soc 20, 441–450 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-020-00772-1

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