Abstract:

As society becomes more complex and diverse, it is increasingly important to demonstrate teamwork, which is the ability to work flexibly and appropriately to deal with unexpected problems and changes. In fact, due to the recent pandemic, it is inevitable to carry out team projects online. In such cases, unexpected situations can occur, and the work environment is completely different from face-to-face projects. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the characteristics and orientation of individuals that are important to perform well against unexpected situations in an online environment.

This paper is based on Cross-cultural Engineering Project (CEP), a problem-solving project in which teams of Japanese and overseas students propose solutions to any given problem as a theme. In the CEP, we focused on the change in performance of each team before and after the Oh My God (OMG) experience. The OMG experience requires flexible decision-making and close collaboration within a team to achieve unexpected missions under time and cost constraints. Two types of questionnaires were administered to the participants of the CEP2020@SIT (Online) held in December 2020. The first was a lifeline analysis, in which participants were asked to rate their daily motivation on a 7-scale from -3 to 3 throughout the CEP. Afterwards, the change in motivation for each team was calculated. The second questionnaire focused on the abilities that the participants considered important among the four abilities in OMG. The four abilities in OMG consist of Team-orientation, Backup, Monitoring, and Leadership. In this analysis, teams whose motivation increased after the OMG experience were grouped as Cluster1, whereas teams whose motivation decreased in this experience were grouped as Cluster2. The percentage of abilities which were considered important in each group was then calculated. Afterwards, the results were compared with the results from previous year’s CEP2019@SIT which occurred in a face-to-face environment. Both results were compared to analyze the differences in the competencies that are considered important under online and face-to-face environments by using Test for the Difference in the Population Proportions.

As a result, for Cluster1, there was an increase of 7.0% with a significant difference (p=0.029) of the number of students who considered “Grasping the situation”, a Monitoring ability, important in online CEP. This suggests that online projects, which are physically isolated environments, made it difficult to share their progress and their goal than they would in face-to-face CEP, so they tried to grasp the situation consciously. On the other hand, in the face-to-face CEP, Backup ability increased by 6.0% with a significant trend (p=0.064). In face-to-face CEP, since they shared the same space to carry out the project, they considered emotional support or informative support as important. For Cluster2, there were no significant differences or trends to any abilities in both online and face-to-face CEP. From those results, we found that different abilities were considered as important. The number of online projects will further increase and become more common in the future. In an online environment, students are physically isolated with limited means of communication, which makes it more important to understand how the team is doing rather than when they are in face-to-face projects where they are physically present and can easily communicate.

Keywords:

Project-based Learning, Improvisation, Teamwork Competency, Multinational Team, Online Project.