Assessment of Interaction in Multinational Projects: A Gender Comparison

Published in: Proceedings of the 13th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology: Engineering Education Facing the Grand Challenges, What Are We Doing?
Date of Conference: July 29 - 31, 2015
Location of Conference: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Authors: Jaime Nuñez
Ivan E. Esparragoza
Sheila Lascano
Jared Ocampo
Jorge Duque Rivera
Roberto Vigano
Refereed Paper: #125

Abstract:

The development of multinational collaborative projects in the academia is becoming a practice to educate students with global competencies. This educational approach is being used to expose students to an international experience through projectbased learning experiences in multinational settings. However, the effectiveness of this approach has not been rigorously assessed. The research team has been working in the understanding of this practice to enhance the overall experience and create a learning environment that fosters the development of global competencies. According to the literature, the interaction among distributed teams is critical in achieving the goals of the team. Therefore, the interaction of students participating in multinational collaborative projects has been a focus of interest for the research team. The aim of this work is to compare, based on the gender, the level of interaction of participants and the use of social interaction during the development of a multinational design project. This paper presents a description of the findings based on the data collected and is the beginning of a subsequent inferential analysis.

Keywords—Collaborative projects, multinational, teams’ interaction.