Learning virtual project work

There are a variety of challenges in organizing productive virtual collaboration projects. Problems of commitment and co-ordination are all common. Organized use of collaboration technologies with appropriate organization and management of activities can help avoid these obstacles. We have developed and tested a model that is intended to support learning of project management and virtual teamwork. It can be applied for introducing collaboration models and practices to global firms, or as we have done, to collaboration between university seminars. The model includes a multi-layered organization structure according to which virtual or semi-virtual teams are built. Facilitation of the exercise is supported with students operating in two layers: coordination and reflection layers. The model has evolved and we report experiences from tests with two seminars during 2003. The first seminar was arranged between courses at three universities, and two universities was participating the second one. We describe the basic constructs of the model, our experiences and preliminary results of studies.