The book is divided into five parts representing five key issues discussed at the workshop, with the call for contributions to this book framed around the following topic areas: 1. Organisation - team size and composition, supporting with sessions such as lectures and tutorials, sourcing projects, ways in which tutors monitor progress and provide guidance. 2. Management – strategies and tools for teams to use for project management, and ways in which students manage their project progress. 3. Assessment - issues of individual participation, how to assess learning, skills and personal development. Assessment of process and/or product, and fairness in group assessing. 4. Development of skills - using team projects to provide opportunities, getting students to recognise them, and reflection on learning and self development. 5. Differences from the workplace – preparing students for global team working.

This book has arisen from a Higher Education Academy funded workshop, held in October 2012, to bring together academics who regularly use team projects in their teaching in higher education. The attendees at the workshop were all devoted to using team projects in some form or other, and at the event they shared best practice. In closing the workshop there was agreement that the reported good practice and ideas could be shared more widely, so the concept of this book was born. Many ideas in the book may not be new, but this is the first time descriptions of a wide range of activities and effective practice has been put together in one volume, together with discussion of the issues that commonly arise, to offer suggestions for avoiding or reducing the impact of difficulties for learners. In making the volume free to read online, we hope to reach a wider readership, including those short of resources, who may obtain ideas and insights into the practice of using team projects in their discipline, from which they can develop new activities, with some justification. Contributions were sought from further afield than the workshop attendees to also allow for effective practice to be shared from those unable to attend the workshop. Many of us in higher education use team projects in our teaching, with varying degrees of success, in that the many issues that may arise often prevent the activity from being completely successful. Professionals in Higher Education, who teach or who support learning, often achieve success in some areas and can be said to be applying effective practice; it is by bringing together cases that present good or effective practice, that potential solutions to issues arising in others’ implementations may be found.

This book examines what collaboration means in practice, and the factors that enable effective team collaboration for learning and teaching in higher education. It explains how academics can work more collaboratively, and how universities can organise and govern themselves by means of collaboration. The book brings together current research and commentaries on collaboration in higher education to provide important guidance derived from a synthesis and evaluation of the existing empirical research and commentaries in the field. The book will benefit all readers who are interested in making their own teams and higher education organisations more collaborative. It will help them plan collaborative innovations in their organisations, identify priorities for professional capacity building, and design collaborative organisational structures.

The research papers and case studies contained in this volume explore the technique of group work in higher education. The contributors explore project work, self-development groups, the management of group projects, peer evaluation and learning-team techniques.

This guide will help instructors better understand the skills that underlie effective teamwork, offer strategies for structuring group projects, and provide advice on imparting the knowledge and support that students need to develop highly functional, advanced teamwork skills. Even instructors with a great deal of experience in structuring collaborative learning projects may recognize the gap that exists between their current efforts in providing students with teamwork experiences and effectively training students’ teamwork skills. By drawing on literature from the fields of organizational teamwork and teamwork pedagogy in higher education, the authors identify the processes associated with effective teamwork, relate these processes to teamwork in student teams, and distill and organize strategies for developing students’ teamwork knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Featuring evidence-informed tools, case studies, and best practices, this highly practical text provides everything higher education instructors need to target and advance their students’ teamwork competencies while maximizing the learning benefits of peer collaboration.

In recent years, virtual teams have become a feature of most corporate workplaces, yet few academic programs prepare students to work in virtual teams, and few textbooks support the development of key skills for virtual teamwork. The primary purpose of this book is to enable higher education students to participate in virtual teams with students from other institutions, who potentially operate in different countries, time zones, and/or cultures. The book guides students through the process of working in virtual team projects for their classes, and helps them to engage with the learning experiences, and to respond to potential challenges. The book is directed towards students within any of the following disciplines: Business; Information Technology; Communication Studies; and Engineering. One section of the book also guides teachers through the process of organizing virtual team projects, and explores the teacher/teacher collaboration that is an inevitable consequence of organizing inter-institutional student virtual team projects. It provides advice for teachers on how to manage administrative challenges such as conflicting institutional schedules and grading mechanisms. In addition, it discusses research themes and data gathering and analysis techniques for teachers who wish to publish findings about the virtual team process and outcomes. As well as students and teachers, the book is also useful for researchers exploring any of the following themes: Technology use in virtual teams; Communication strategies and international communication in virtual teams; Communities of learning, e-learning, and virtual teams; Challenges of virtual teamwork; Planning a virtual team collaboration project; and Gathering and analyzing data about virtual collaboration.

Team-Based Learning (TBL) is a unique, powerful, and proven form of small-group learning that is being increasingly adopted in higher education. Teachers who use TBL report high levels of engagement, critical thinking, and retention among their students. TBL has been used successfully in both small and large classes, in computer-supported and online classes; and because it is group work that works, it has been implemented in nearly every discipline and in countries around the world.This book introduces the elements of TBL and how to apply them in the social sciences and humanities. It describes the four essential elements of TBL – readiness assurance, design of application exercises, permanent teams, peer evaluation – and pays particular attention to the specification of learning outcomes, which can be a unique challenge in these fields.The core of the book consists of examples of how TBL has been incorporated into the cultures of disciplines as varied as economics, education, literature, politics, psychology, and theatre. The authors explain why they felt a need to change how they taught and why they chose TBL. Furthermore, each chapter provides examples of the assignments and exercises they use to help their students achieve the specific learning outcomes of their courses.At a time of increasing course sizes, and emphasis on learning outcomes, TBL offers the means to meet such demands while connecting students to their coursework, and stimulating their intellectual engagement.

This book collects state-of-the-art curriculum development considerations, training methods, techniques, and best practices, as well as cybersecurity lab requirements and aspects to take into account when setting up new labs, all based on hands-on experience in teaching cybersecurity in higher education.In parallel with the increasing number and impact of cyberattacks, there is a growing demand for cybersecurity courses in higher education. More and more educational institutions offer cybersecurity courses, which come with unique and constantly evolving challenges not known in other disciplines. For example, step-by-step guides may not work for some of the students if the configuration of a computing environment is not identical or similar enough to the one the workshop material is based on, which can be a huge problem for blended and online delivery modes. Using nested virtualization in a cloud infrastructure might not be authentic for all kinds of exercises, because some of its characteristics can be vastly different from an enterprise network environment that would be the most important to demonstrate to students. The availability of cybersecurity datasets for training and educational purposes can be limited, and the publicly available datasets might not suit a large share of training materials, because they are often excessively documented, but not only by authoritative websites, which render these inappropriate for assignments and can be misleading for online students following training workshops and looking for online resources about datasets such as the Boss of the SOC (BOTS) datasets. The constant changes of Kali Linux make it necessary to regularly update training materials, because commands might not run the same way they did a couple of months ago. The many challenges of cybersecurity education are further complicated by the continuous evolution of networking and cloud computing, hardware and software, which shapes student expectations: what is acceptable and respected today might be obsolete or even laughable tomorrow.

This book describes team-based learning (TBL), an unusually powerful and versatile teaching strategy that enables teachers to take small group learning to a whole new level of effectiveness. It is the only pedagogical use of small groups that is based on a recognition of the critical difference between "groups" and "teams", and intentionally employs specific procedures to transform newly-formed groups into high performance learning teams.This book is a complete guide to implementing TBL in a way that will promote the deep learning all teachers strive for. This is a teaching strategy that promotes critical thinking, collaboration, mastery of discipline knowledge, and the ability to apply it.Part I covers the basics, beginning with an analysis of the relative merits and limitations of small groups and teams. It then sets out the processes, with much practical advice, for transforming small groups into cohesive teams, for creating effective assignments and thinking through the implications of team-based learning.In Part II teachers from disciplines as varied as accounting, biology, business, ecology, chemistry, health education and law describe their use of team-based learning. They also demonstrate how this teaching strategy can be applied equally effectively in environments such as large classes, mixed traditional and on-line classes, and with highly diverse student populations.Part III offers a synopsis of the major lessons to be learned from the experiences of the teachers who have used TBL, as described in Part II. For teachers contemplating the use of TBL, this section provides answers to key questions, e.g., whether to use team-based learning, what it takes to make it work effectively, and what benefits one can expect from it–for the teacher as well as for the learners.The appendices answer frequently asked questions, include useful forms and exercises, and offer advice on peer evaluations and grading. A related Web site that allows readers to “continue the conversation,” view video material, access indexed descriptions of applications in various disciplines and post questions further enriches the book. The editors’ claim that team-based instruction can transform the quality of student learning is fully supported by the empirical evidence and examples they present. An important book for all teachers in higher education.

"This volume is grounded in the thesis that information technology may offer the only viable avenue to the implementation of constructivist and progressive educational principles in higher education, and that the numerous efforts now under way to realize these principles deserve examination and evaluation"--Provided by publisher.