Six weeks before the workshops the introduction of participants, team building and teamwork
started using online social media tools. At least one student from each partner institute was in
each of the five teams with one lecturer per team as the main coach. The idea of the pre-
workshop phase of activities in theory was a good one because it could engage students in
their local groups and their international groups and could also act as an icebreaker for when
the students were together. In the case of MC2020, this practice yielded some success. Whilst
some activities struggled to attract engagement from the participants others exceeded
expectation and their success suggest a model of collaborative remote working could be
created based on the approach taken and the actual content of the activity.
An example of a task where high user participation was observed was the 'creation of an
identity' to visually represent the collective work undertaken as part of the project. Using
Google Documents in this manner allowed for qualitative evidence to be gathered and
immediate feedback issued and responded to - in some instances; in real-time thanks to the
“live” document model where multiple collaborators contribute to the same document and
can see when others are viewing and editing it. This in turn allowed for the document to form
a social hub around it so ideas were quickly discussed, agreed and documented.
Where tasks were less successful it was observed that the students were possibly
uncomfortable with the fact they are working on potentially “live” documents and wished
their contributions to be in more finalised or formal state before contributing. This was
especially evident with students for whose primary language was not English. On a number of
occasions, even on visually oriented activities, it was observed that students would view the
documents often but contribute infrequently, if at all. This suggests a willingness to collaborate
but there are still apparent barriers that prevent full-engagement that are nothing to do with
technology.