The purpose of this wiki is to help IT educators pool ideas, syllabi, and other pedagogical tools for teaching courses on virtual work, including collaboration with remote individuals, working on virtual teams, and engaging in online work-related communities. As a field, IT faculty know quite a bit about these topics, and our journals are filled with terrific research on various aspects of virtual work (e.g., working on and leading virtual teams, the opportunities and challenges of computer-mediated communication, learning in online communities and networks of practice, the challenges of telecommuting, etc.). And yet, despite the widespread prevalence of virtual work in today's organizations, few business schools offer courses designed to teach undergraduate or master's students about the complexities and challenges of working virtually.
There is potential for IT educators in schools of commerce and business to pool ideas and develop a "core" course in virtual work targeted not exclusively at IT majors, but at the broader population of busines students. Such a course could complement existing "introduction to IS" courses, which sometimes cover virtual work lightly within their traditional focus on the development of new technologies to help firms compete. A virtual work core course would help students understand how to be effective virtual workers, collaborating and interacting with a broad range of individuals in a variety of ways across the boundaries of geography, culture, and time zone.
Undoubtedly this kind of course is already offered somewhere; the goal of this wiki is to encourage those who are already teaching students about virtual work to pool resources (syllabi, topic modules, cases, exercises, etc.) here, and in doing so, improve our field's ability to teach this topic effectively. For those of who are not yet teaching this kind of content but would like to, this wiki could provide a wealth of ideas about how to approach the topic, effective pedagogical tools, and ways of structuring the content into various delivery formats.
In business schools where virtual work is a neglected topic, a new core course could provide a valuable focal point for interactions amongst IT faculty and students, helping prepare students for careers that will undoubtedly involve increasing levels of technology-mediated interactions with colleagues, physically distant oragnizational members, suppliers, customers, and partner firms. If you have content or materials that would help undergraduate or masters students learn how to work virtually, please feel free to add it (or links to it) on the appropriate pages below.
Virtual work learning objectives: What should we teach?
Virtual work syllabi: What have others done so far?
Teachable lessons from virtual work research: How can our research inform our teaching?
If you have any comments, questions, or content you would like to share but do not feel comfortable editing the Wiki yourself, please feel free to contact Peter Gray at (434) 982-2696 or pgray (at) virginia.edu.
The Wiki has to date only been online in seeding mode, but will soon be announced publicly on the ISworld page.
Changes since Mar 30, 2024 12:22 PM