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Knowledge Creating Inquiry in a Distributed Project-Management Course

The investigation examined how to simulate practices of distributed, partially virtual teamwork in higher education. A course was designed to engage ten teams in producing solutions to complex problems, similar to that in knowledge work. The teams researched and prepared final reports and project presentations (shared objects) based on assignments from two customers. The course design provided templates and communication structures, but the teams needed to self-organize in order to carry out their own goals. Two analyses examined how the arranged project promoted practices of distributed, hybrid knowledge work and how the students coped with the knowledge creation challenge. Based on the team interviews half-way through the course, the students were confused and even distressed with the open-ended assignment. At the end of the course, their self-reflections revealed a change to more positive appraisals of the assignment. It was concluded that there were two types of practices involved, project work and inquiry, which might be best supported with different types of scaffolding, the first pragmatic or structural and the latter epistemic. This course presents an example of how workplace practices can be modeled for education, but also points to needs for scaffolding challenging team processes.