A Cooperative Approach to Lab-Based, Multi-Team Courses in an iSchool

The iSchool at the University of Pittsburgh has designed a new learning experience that will allow future leaders of the iProfession to gain critical skills and to experience working in culturally diverse teams. The iSchool has, as one of its mission-critical goals, to create learning experiences that imitate the collaborative nature of the information professions. To provide this opportunity and following the advice from industry experts, our iSchool redesigned the laboratory for teaching and learning computer networking topics to support hands-on lab experiences for students as well as the research activities of the iSchool faculty. However, it goes beyond mere workstations in a lab space – it is an experiment to create a multi-team environment that facilitates cooperative approaches to problem solving. It also requires the students to participate in self-directed learning. This poster presentation reports how the lab and accompanying courses were designed to address a key aspect in working in the information field – how to work as a team to solve a problem. Although the iSchool created this lab as part of its graduate program in Telecommunications, the pedagogical aspects of the lab and curriculum design would be applicable to any discipline within the information field