Project-Based Collaborative Learning: Negotiating Leadership and Commitment in Virtual Teams

Identifying, formulating, and maintaining a shared focus in a project group is a difficult and complex negotiation process. We investigate this negotiation process in an educational setting with students collaborating in virtual project teams. We examine the asynchronous online negotiations of three project groups during one semester of project-based studies. The students are geographically dispersed and engaged in tightly coupled collaboration mediated by a text-only groupware system. The analysis leads to the identification of two issues that may jeopardize virtual negotiations: a risk of individualistic proactive behaviour that constrains consensus building and prevents progress and a risk of one student taking the lead while the other students assume subordinate roles and learn less. The study shows how the groupware system that mediated the students’ negotiations about their project also entered into their handling of these two risks.