Virtual Teams in Education

The internet is a virtual community where people meet, engage in discourse, become friends, fall in love, and develop all of the relationships that are developed in physical communities.

However, the internet may not be a panacea. The internet goes beyond technology into social interaction. Organizations face a dilemma of encouraging successful interactions and community building online. Statistics suggest almost ten million people work in virtual offices and that 40 percent of large organizations have policies on telecommuting.

A virtual team is a group of people who work on interdependently across space, time, cultures, and organizational boundaries on temporary, non-occurring projects with a shared purpose while using technology. The number of virtual teams is rapidly increasing in educational and workplace settings. Yet despite the rapid growth of virtual teams in workplace and educational settings, there is little conclusive evidence concerning online distance education and the literature on learning in work-place virtual teams is rare.

The term virtual teaming was coined in the early 1990s to describe a team, that is, people who collaborate closely, whose members are not in the same location. Virtual teaming makes geography irrelevant for integrating and co-ordinating operations.

There are many advantages for using virtual teams in the workplace. Advantages include cross-functional coordination of activities. In addition, members with various skills and perspectives work together to produce a certain output or product. Virtual teams also contribute by generating knowledge and sharing information. Virtual teams also enable organizations to become more flexible and to compete globally. These types of teams are popular among new workers and those who want to work at home. For education, virtual teams have become the vehicle through which group work is accomplished in distance learning environments.

The increasing growth of virtual teams in the workplace and in distance education as well as the opportunity to examine the humanistic side of learning that can occur within these settings makes it critical to investigate learning in virtual teams.