Tendering in Virtual Teams - Challenges and Opportunities for Distance Learners

Electronic communication is proliferating throughout industry and academia. Its use is not limited to communications between individuals. Evolving technologies support and facilitate collaboration where individuals and / or teams work in geographically different locations to their colleagues. The challenges of working in such environments are briefly reported in this paper based on other work completed by the authors and others. The impact of such approaches is then explored in the context of the delivery of a course to third year distance learning students in the School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle, Australia. We briefly review assessment strategies appropriate for students working in virtual environments. We then describe how we assessed our students using student peer / self-assessment and meeting logs. We describe some of the benefits of such multiple perspective assessments including students developing a clear understanding of their individual performance, the contributions they have made to the process and the outcomes achieved by their group. The paper also reports on a student evaluation of virtual teamwork and concludes by drawing on this feedback to argue that virtual teamwork has a place in the education of construction students.