Networked Learning 2006 Symposium 03 International Teamworking and eLearning Design Helen Spencer-Oatey and Min Tang University of Cambridge, Beijing Normal University hs343@cam.ac.uk, tangmint@yahoo.com ABSTRACT This paper focuses on international teamworking issues that arose in the initial pilot projects of the eChina~UK Programme. The authors collected a range of data over a 3 year period, including written records of meetings and email exchanges. In addition, they conducted two rounds of in-depth interviews with all the primary team members. This paper presents the findings that are most pertinent to effective teamworking for the design of eLearning courses, particularly in relation to project management. The authors identify important lessons for the effective management of international eLearning design projects that have emerged from their findings. Keywords International teams, learning design, China, intercultural communication INTRODUCTION Extensive research evidence, especially from the field of international management (e.g. de Dreu 2002; Distefano and Maznevski 2000; Janssens and Brett 1997; Maznevski 1994; Maznevski and Chudoba 2000; Polzer, Milton and Swann 2002; West 2002), has shown that diversity within a team is a double-edged sword: that it has the potential to improve creativity, innovation and performance, but that if it is not managed effectively, it can have an extremely negative and disruptive effect. Recent research in eLearning also points to the major impact that collaboration processes can have on the development of high quality eLearning materials (Conole 2005, personal communication). When the Higher Education Funding Council for England (henceforth HEFCE) and the Chinese Ministry of Education (henceforth the MoE) established the eChina~UK Programme, HEFCE’s belief and hope (personal communication from the Chair of the Steering Committee) was that the different experiences and perspectives of the British and Chinese team members would lead to more innovative solutions to the challenges of eLearning design than if the British or the Chinese teams just worked independently. The first set of pilot projects have now been completed, and the eChina~UK Programme has been extended because of the richness of the achievements and insights that are emerging. This paper reports findings from the monitoring research that took place into the various teams’ collaborations. The research explored British and Chinese team members’ accounts of and reflections on the challenges they faced and their strategies for managing them. This paper focuses on the issues that were particularly crucial for effective eLearning design, especially in terms of project management. METHODOLOGY eChina~UK Team Members There were four initial eChina~UK pilot projects, and they involved partnerships between three British and three Chinese universities/consortia as shown in Table 1. Since most of the projects entailed the development of several modules, each requiring different academic expertise (e.g. one project developed modules in Educational Psychology, Generic Methodology, and eLearning and Educational Technology), this meant that the teams were often very large. For example, there were about 35 staff at Beijing Normal University, 30 at World Universities Network (Universities of Manchester, Sheffield, Southampton and Bristol) and 20 at the University of Nottingham working on their respective projects. (It is impossible to identify precisely the size of the teams because members varied in the extent to which they were involved and according to the phase of the project.) Moreover, each of the projects had team members that were diverse in a large number of different ways, including: professional expertise (e.g. academics, technologists), subject area expertise (e.g. Applied Linguistics, Educational Psychology), nationality (e.g. British, Chinese, French, American), geographical location (e.g. Britain, China, Austria), linguistic expertise (monolingual speaker, fluent bilingual speaker, limited bilingual speaker), expertise in eLearning (e.g. very experienced, novice), beliefs about eLearning design (e.g. re linearity, collaborative learning, problem-based learning).