Abstract

Exposing students to international experiences is becoming a common practice to prepare students with global capabilities. One pedagogical activity used to promote global competencies is the participation of students in multinational design projects. This is a problem-based learning approach in an international setting, where students get immersed in the solution of anengineering design task while they work in teams and collaborate with international partners. The main goal of these projects is to foster international collaboration and to offer an opportunity to the students to develop professional skills through international teamwork effort in the solution of a design problem. However, a real challenge of this practice has been to create an effective interaction among the students participating in this type of projects and to maintain the flow of information, and student engagement in the project and in their learning. The main objective of this work is to investigate the sociotechnical interaction of engineering students working in a multinational collaborative project and the role of information technology tools and the nature of the interaction in this experience. For this purpose an assessment tool was developed and used to determine the interaction among the students (frequency, quantity and quality), the value of social interaction in the flow of the interaction, and the impact of the interaction in the development of the project. The main findings of this instrument are presented in this work.