Discussions

Your Name and Title: Anne Fox, Trainer, learning coach

School or Organization Name: Anne Fox ApS

Co-Presenter Name(s): None

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Denmark, Europe

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Target Audience(s): Adult educators and Higher Education instructors

Short Session Description (one line): How to promote online teamwork and peer collaboration across borders; a comparison of two pilot European online courses to promote entrepreneurship.

Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

I am a partner in two EU-supported projects that are developing online pilot courses to raise the entrepreneurial awareness of two separate target groups. One of the key skills of entrepreneurship training is the need to collaborate with others. The issues I will be addressing is how much quality collaboration is possible online and what are the pre-requisites for facilitating online collaboration internationally?

How will we promote collaboration?

One thing we are definitely not aiming to do is to replicate the intensive face-to-face start-up weekend experience. But we do see advantages in the online approach, not the least of which will be the opportunity for participants in both courses to work with each other across cultures and national borders.

While it is easy to make a case for including team activities and peer evaluation in both cases, it is not simply a case of adding a few tasks in which participants are asked to work together or to evaluate each others work. Online collaboration, just as much as face to face collaboration, is dependent on the basis of pre-existing trust between participants. This means that we must include and promote trust-building activities in advance of scheduling team tasks or peer evaluations.

Attend this session to find out more about each course and our experience to date with the first pilots, how we facilitated trust-building and whether it succeeded with reference to the team and peer tasks.

The projects

In the CCD-FLITE project we are targeting bachelor level computer students as well as people already employed in the computer industry who may be interested in a bit of intrapreneurship. The idea here is to match the students with the employees and have them work in small cross-border groups on a business idea that finishes with a skeleton business plan. We are aiming to attract course participants from across Europe and for the small groups to be intercultural as well as a mix of students and employees.

In the M-HOUSE project, we are targeting adults who are either unemployed or underemployed and who would like to explore entrepreneurship. In this case, we will do this by getting participants to transfer skills they already have in running their own household, such as conflict resolution, purchasing major items and organising larger events such as birthday parties and making the connection to business skills.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:

http://annefox.eu

http://www.m-house.eu/

http://www.ccdflite.eu