Panel: Challenges to Facilitating Virtual Database Project Teams

The moderator and panelists recently coordinated a virtual team project involving students from their respective universities. MIS students from each university were organized into cross-institution project teams and tasked with designing a database. All courses used the same textbook and the same semester-long project with four clearly defined deliverables. Student team members used groupware (Yahoo! Groups) to communicate, work together, share draft documents, discuss and solve problems, and turn in their project deliverables. Team members were anonymous other than their Yahoo! identifiers. The participating instructors also used Yahoo! Groups to provide project requirements, post project files, and answer student questions in a shared workspace. The panelists will share their experiences by presenting and discussing technical, organizational, and communication challenges that arose during the semester; student processes and outcomes; and implications for understanding virtual project teams. The panelists will solicit questions and comments from the audience, and will offer lessons learned and prescriptions for others who would like to undertake similar efforts. The panelists have all published related research in this area, and all have instructional experience in the panel topics.