Learning from students: continuous improvement in international collaboration

Just a few years ago, incorporating team projects in a course meant that all students had to be collocated, able to meet face-to-face. Now, distributed teams use the Internet and other technologies to work across time and distance. Instructors who include distributed team projects in their courses add the dimensions of collaborative technologies, language, and culture to the technical problem-solving and team-building aspects. Continuous improvement in course structure and content are necessary to meet the changing needs of students as well as the changes in technology. This paper traces the evolution of a distributed project course offered since 1998. Each time the course has been run, students, faculty, and researchers have learned important lessons, which have been used to improve successive course offerings.