Sociocultural Learning in Globally Distributed Teams: An Exploratory Study

Characteristics of the new millennium suggest that we give students the experience of working in multi-cultural distributed teams to prepare them for present and future organizational demands. In general, students respond positively to this type of learning activity. However, we know little in terms of what they are really learning, how to improve the environment in which that learning takes place and how to assess the improvements, if any. In this paper we use tenets of the sociocultural learning model to explore aspects of learning in culturally differentiated teams distributed on two continents, using groupware for project support. We conclude that learning is taking place in a number of ways that makes relevant use of multi-cultural distributed teams and that our measurement instrument provides an initial basis for comparison across classes and technologies to assess whether we are improving the learning environment.