Case study of a course-based virtual collaboration assignment
As an exploratory study to examine the potential of a course assignment to
build virtual collaboration skills, we engaged 66 undergraduate students enrolled in an
introductory human resource management class in a virtual research project. The
students attended two universities in different regions of the USA, thus making face-to face
interaction impossible. All communication and collaboration had to occur via
technology. A pre-project survey showed that none of the participants had previous
experience with virtual collaboration; this was a new experience for all students and
for the instructors. Participants also completed a survey to measure web-oriented
digital literacy (Hargittai, 2009), a proxy for online skills. No differences were found
based on participant gender or university affiliation.