Work in progress — Effective teaching of technical teamwork to large cohorts of engineering students in China

Teamwork skills have been acknowledged as the key skills of potential engineers by industries internationally, including Chinese enterprises. This paper reports research in a joint Sino-UK programme in China on how teamwork can best be taught. Literature shows that little work has been done to find effective ways to teach teamwork to engineering students in China. This work attempts to implement successful cooperative learning practices of the West to a module that takes teamwork skills as one of its key teaching objectives and tries to design a new model for instructors to follow to teach teamwork effectively to Chinese engineering students. Preliminary results show that Chinese engineering students need training and practices in teamwork skills, and the situation is not exactly the same as previous research in other Confucius Heritage Culture countries.