The Effectiveness Of Team Project Work For Distance Education Students

Project Based Learning (PBL) has been recently introduced to a final year structural design course at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and one assessable requirement associated with the project is teamwork. Unfortunately, when teamwork was first introduced to the course in 2010, most students chose to work individually. The project was re-designed and teamwork was made compulsory when the course was offered in 2011. In order to maximise the benefit of teamwork, a questionnaire was sent to students to identify their perceived strengths and weaknesses related to the design project before it commenced. The distance education team members were then matched up based on the questionnaire. A second questionnaire was sent to students after the project was completed to check if students valued teamwork more compared with the responses from the previous year. This paper will discuss the analysis of student feedback before and after the project, compare the outcomes between distance education (external) and on-campus students and explore potential means of promoting teamwork to distance students.