This is the penultimate week of our virtual team project and it’s been testing for most of our group. Perfecting teamwork is a challenge. We have had various levels of engagement over the past few weeks. Some team members have worked really hard on the project, I think the editors probably contributed the most. Some teams members are great at keeping in touch on Slack, others don’t. We have had sporadic updates from one of the French team. The other student hasn’t engaged.
Our graphic designer changed all the text and left us with a document that we couldn’t edit and went on holidays. That was the low point until he commented that he was only giving 20% to the project as that’s all its worth. We’ve sunk even lower.
One of the US students, who has been great throughout the project got access to the editing software and had a list of issues to fix. Great news, until she sent back the document with graphics are all over the place, no numbering for each step and section 3 was still incorrect. It’s now 48 hours before the deadline and we have no cover page, no alignment on the graphics, no numbering and most of us are losing the will!
I understand why we are doing this project and ultimately it’s very beneficial. It’s also very frustrating. Cleary and Slattery’s (2009) article on virtual teamwork has “uncooperative and non-participating team members” recorded first on their list of challenges for students on this project. My experience defiantly concurs. Work experience has also been a challenge for us. Apart from one or two part-time students there is very little experience on our team with the different stages of this project. In hindsight we should have designated a project manager rather than a project lead from each site.
What has been good to see over the past few days is most people are pulling together and some of the student who rarely engaged much are now asking how they can help. Hopefully our document will be in better shape by Monday evening. After all the planning, writing, editing and time spent it would be a shame if it’s not at least 80% good enough.
References
Cleary, Y. and Slattery, D. (2009) ‘Virtual teams in higher education: challenges and rewards for teachers and students’, in 2009 The All Ireland Society for Higher Education, available: https://ulir.ul.ie/bitstream/handle/10344/7268/Slattery_2009_Virtual.pdf?sequence=1 [last accessed 23rd March 2019]
Contemplating Writing 