Analysis of students opinion about a creative design experience by means of virtual sincronous teams
Year: 2013
Editor: John Lawlor, Ger Reilly, Robert Simpson, Michael Ring, Ahmed Kovacevic, Mark McGrath, William Ion, David Tormey, Erik Bohemia, Chris McMahon, Brian Parkinson
Author: Mulet, Elena; Escamilla, Nathalie; Chulvi, Vicente; Garcia-Garcia, Carlos; Felip, Francisco; Galán, Julia
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Universitat Jaume I, Spain
Section: Creativity
Page(s): 126-131
ISBN: 978-1-904670-42-1
Abstract
It is very frequent that in engineering design education students work in teams organizing themselves in face-to-face work meetings as well as by means of online applications to share documents and communicate when they are in different physical places. The aim of this work is to analyze the studentsâ opinion about developing creative design tasks by means of virtual teams editing a sketch file synchronously and communicating by chat. An experiment was done in which 21 teams of three students each one generated creative ideas both by face-to-face and virtually. Their opinion has been evaluated by means of a questionnaire. The results show that the students find that the interface is pleasant and they have enjoyed the experience of using it. They feel satisfied with the amount of information available and the organization of the information in the screen. Design students also think that it is easy to learn to use the IT tool and that it is fine to develop a creative design task in virtual teams. However, students think that the assigned design task is more difficult to do in virtual teams and that it can be solved in a better and faster way in face-to-face teams. A 30% of the students have felt equally satisfied, but a 46% have felt more satisfied in the face-to-face. As a conclusion of the study this kind of creative design tasks are more efficient, in the opinion of the students, in face-to-face teams than in virtual teams using chat.
Keywords: ITs in education, virtual teams in design education, students opinion, creative design, collaborative design