Currently our teams prepare the presentations of their results for the final event of our International STEM Summer School on Thursday, June 9th, 2016.

They now worked for nearly 9 weeks in their teams. Together they surmounted all the described challenges and difficulties.

We all look forward to the final presentation of our teams. They are excited about their opportunity to present their results to the consultants from the industry and the university as well as to the interested audience.

Good luck to all our teams!!!

The end of our Summer School is coming. Our participants used the opportunity to reflect on the team work. The teams spoke especially about the influence of intercultural differences and what they have learned during the project.

Edwin Prieto from Colombia answered for example the question: How has the international STEM Summer School changed your perception about intercultural differences?

The teams discussed the strategy of case solving based on their collected information. They developed different approaches and characterized them with the help of self-chosen criteria. In this context the teams needed to take decisions.

How to take well founded decisions in a team?

Each participant has a different professional background. Hence, the perspectives on the case and its possible solution vary. The knowledge and expertise of every group member have to be taken into account. To meet this challenge, the teams obviously had to be successful with the exchange of information. In order to take well founded decisions, existing information had to be shared, evaluated and rearranged. Therefore, the teams used different ways:

• Upload their own information on the shared learning platform, so that all the group members have access to it
• Groups in social networks for short but necessary arrangements, such as the reconciliation of dates
• Virtual meetings to provide documents, discuss the found information and find a common strategy that includes the ideas and knowledge of all the team members

The teams arranged virtual meetings or chatted with their consultants to ask concrete questions concerning the case.

In the following you find two examples for the exchange of information within the team:

This picture shows how virtual meetings can be used by the teams to provide documents (Discussion Notes) and discuss the found information (Chat). The participants of the virtual meeting can also hear (Voice) and see (Camera) each other. In this special meeting the consultant of the group took part and answered the open questions concerning the case.

Here you can see an example for the team organization via groups in social networks. In this case the group is used for short but necessary arrangements, such as the reconciliation of dates.

During the last week our teams determined their common team goal and set the steps to reach it:

• establishing subjects that have to be achieved
• defining resulting tasks
• allocating the tasks to team members

In this context the next challenge waited…

How to visualize the results of the individual work for the whole team?

The common objective is to present the results of the team in the end of the Summer School. Therefore, it is necessary to visualize the individually gathered knowledge in an easy and understandable manner for the other team members. Without this, it wouldn’t be possible to create a common presentation of results that contains the knowledge and expertise of all team members. To enable the exchange within the international groups, a closed workspace for the respective team was implemented on the learning platform. There, the teams can use, for example, wiki, forum and announcement element to share collected information. In addition, it is optional for the participants to use their personal communication channels (email, phone, social media, instant messaging, etc.). Thereby, it becomes clear that, within our Summer School, the use of digital media follows the aspect of usefulness for distance cooperation and collaboration.

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Our teams already got a first impression of the cases. With starting the case study work the teams were faced with the next challenge…

How to start with the work on such a complex topic?

To take up the already present expertise concerning project management of our participants we asked them to briefly describe how they tackled projects until now. In particular, they paid attention to their individual reasons for choosing this way. During their studies and further commitments they already applied project management methods – implicit or explicit. The application of suitable project management methods enables a structured approach and a visualization of the working progress. Our participants got an overview of various project management methods and could find out which ones suit them. Furthermore they took in account the different scopes of project management methods.

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Following our Kick off at April, 12^th 2016, the participants got familiar with their teams and their cases. Before starting with the case study work, another challenge waited…

How to work together in an international team?

The teams have to handle with intercultural differences as well as with different locations. The intercultural differences manifest itself for example in different ways of learning and working as well as in different styles of communication. In addition the participants have various professional levels that lead into different working methods and expectations. The location and time differences impact organizational issues and schedules of participants. Already this short list of examples shows, that the implementation of a profitable and fulfilling team work in the context of internationalization is a quite big deal. To tackle all this, the teams established a common guideline that serves as a basis for their coming teamwork. The guideline comprises for instance following topics:

 

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