Acquiring professional skills: Virtual facilitator as model for team communication

This paper aims to explore some of the professional skills engineering students require, namely leadership, communication, and teamwork. An important tool that may aid in developing those skills is facilitation, a process that encourages information sharing and clear communication, which provides more opportunities for team members to better collaborate. A virtual facilitator was developed to aid in online communication. It provides prompts and interventions designed by using Chris Argyris´s Model II communication techniques to guide the user to communicate in more open ways. This quasi-experimental study explores whether students exposed to virtual facilitator software are more likely to model communication techniques displayed by the virtual facilitator. Teams of students worked online on a time-sensitive project. The virtual facilitator intervened in the conversations of teams in a treatment group, while it remained idle in the Control group. Pre-tests and post-tests were administered to measure whether exposure to the virtual facilitator increased students´ capacity to enact interventions. Based on Albert Bandura´s observational learning theory, researchers expected that students exposed to the virtual facilitator would report the use of more facilitative behaviors.