Reflections on delivering a cross-discipline, cross-cultural, international, masters-level collaborative course using e-Learning technologies

This paper presents a case study on the experience of delivering an Internet-based international collaborative semester course at intermediate postgraduate level and attempts to distill a model for exploring the success factors involved when presenting such courses. The pedagogic and practical implications in terms of the effectiveness of the technological and system administrative choices made for delivering the course content and facilitating team interaction is evaluated. The structure and contents of the course are considered in light of the focus on innovation within the development of novel ubiquitous products and services. Furthermore the synchronous nature of the real time collaboration tools employed are contrasted with asynchronous alternatives given that the participating countries are highly distributed according to longitude and diverse according to their native language, cultural customs and technical skill set. A survey of extant technologies employable in facilitating such courses is presented together with an analysis of the criteria necessary to facilitate a successful delivery of the course. The institutional needs of security and management of its ICS resources are placed in the context of the effective administration of such a course given the highly heterogeneous selection of technologies employed. The contrast of the available resources of the only first world participant, functioning also as the virtual host (the Netherlands), with the remainder of the consortium is made in terms of technological and communication constraints. The problem is then modelled as a multi-agent collaborative communication problem in which participants are represented by proxy agents within a virtual environment. Multi-agency is selected as a framework for analysing the problem domain due to its strong theoretical underpinnings in computer science, economics and other fields. Each agent attempts to maximise its own utility function value based on its ability to solve sub-tasks assigned to it coupled with their contribution to the global utility for the agent’s team. Communication channels exists between agents, vary in terms of their availability over time and are not uniformly distributed between agents. Furthermore such channels may be classed as either synchronous or asynchronous. Likewise in order to model the cross-disciplinary nature of the course each task requires certain competencies to be completed effectively, these competencies are not uniformly distributed amongst the agents. To model differences in time zones each agent's cognitive capacity also varies according to a time based function and point of origin. This model is formalised using standard software engineering modelling languages and salient aspects implemented using standard agent oriented development frameworks. Although the system models a collaboration the reality of such interactions are that agents are inherently self-interested. Due to this, the model allows for differing task allocation strategies to be employed and the emergent effects of policies such as egalitarian, meritocratic and historical performance based distribution schemes to be compared. The end result of this modelling activity is to establish the most favourable mix of communication channels which would need to be provided for a given globally distributed team composition. The model may also be used to explore the most favourable policy-mix from an institution's point of view in order to facilitate such collaborations while maintaining an adequate level of security.Design EngineeringIndustrial Design Engineerin