Distributed collaborative homework activities in a problem-based usability engineering course

Teams of students in an upper-division undergraduate Usability Engineering course used a collaborative environment to carry out a series of three distributed collaborative homework assignments. Assignments were case-based analyses structured using a jigsaw design; students were provided a collaborative software environment and introduced to a simple model of collaboration. We found that students were able to use the collaboration model, though the quality of their collaboration was poor both before and after training. We found that students were able to carry out the distributed collaborative homework activities using our collaborative software environment, though they often used, and sometimes relied on face-to-face interactions. The use of chat to maintain team awareness, and coordinate the development of shared documents, was particularly notable as a practice of our most successful teams. Students reported a great variety of benefits and challenges in carrying out the distributed collaborative homework activities. We speculate on future directions for teaching collaboration skills, and for better supporting team awareness and workflows in distributed collaborative homework activities.