Making connections: an intercultural virtual team project in professional communication

This presentation reports on an intercultural virtual team project conducted by students in two management communication courses, one at the University of Delaware (USA) and one at McGill University (Canada). The goal of the partnership between the two classes was to enhance students´ ability to collaborate across cultures using a variety of technologies for collaboration, a skill they need in order to succeed in the increasingly global and technologically mediated environment of work. Each team, which included students from both universities, compared communication practices in a company or type of business that exists both in the United States and in Canada. Their task was to analyze how the practices reflect and shape the particular environments in which the businesses operate. During the project they advanced and monitored their work through different technologies, including blogs, email, and a designated collaborative Web-based workspace, and they produced several genres of documents reporting their achievements. This presentation first analyzes the advantages, vulnerabilities, and faultlines of virtual intercultural teamwork as students experienced them. We then describe conditions that help teams overcome the risks of virtual work and assess how well we were able to create these conditions in the courses.