Assessing the impacts of online design collaboration in developing global competence among undergraduate engineering students who participate from multiple countries

Globalization continues to change the world, and its influence is becoming more and more apparent in our economy, political affairs, scientific discoveries, entertainment, and many other aspects of our life.  In the 1990s, the impact of globalization became a central discussion topic in the professional engineering community (Lohmann, 2006).  In addition to a transnational manufacturing system and outsourcing of engineers from foreign countries, many companies design and produce their products with a multi-national market in mind.  Furthermore, an international acquisition of a company is no longer a rare occurrence.  As a result, more engineers are required to work with, manage, or be supervised by people from different countries.  To be competitive in this global engineering environment, engineers must develop abilities to produce a high quality product while working in a global team (Grandin, 2006, Downey et al, 2006, Parkinson, 2009).

To prepare future engineers for the global working environment, a summit sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on global engineering education asked educational institutions to recognize global competency as one of the highest priorities in their engineering education and to design a curriculum that facilitates the development of the competency among all students (Parkinson et al., 2009).  To take the challenge, several universities across the U.S. established a program that intended to help their students to develop the global competency (e.g., University of Rhode Island, Lehigh University, MIT, Iowa State University, University of Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology etc.).  In addition to the course work on global topics, such as international relations, world history, global economy, and cultural anthropology, these programs often involve a study abroad program or global internship (Grudzinski-Hall et al, 2007).  Although these international experiences are still considered a golden standard, cost and resource requirements make it hard for many students to actually participate.

To make the global work/collaboration experience more accessible to more students, the Mechanical Engineering department at Brigham Young University is exploring an online alternative.  Using the research funding from NSF, the ME (Mechanical Engineering) 471 course was design to teach students how to design a product using Computer Assisted Design (CAD) software. What is unique about this course is the global participation of university students located at Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. These international students attend lectures using a video conferencing technology and take quizzes and examinations online. Students are divided into smaller groups. Each group has students from different countries, and they are required to use online communication technology to collaborate on all of their design assignments.

Considering the complexity of the global competence, it is not reasonable to expect a result of one course will provide experiences necessary to develop all of the needed competencies. Thus, the purpose of this study is to create assessment tools and methods that measure the global competence developed as a result of the online design collaboration. The result can be then used to answer the following related questions:

1. What is the best way to measure the effectiveness of online design collaboration in developing global competence among college students?
2. What kind of the global competency can be developed through online design collaboration?