Record Detail

Team-based projects are widely used in both traditional face-to-face and onlineprograms in higher education. To date, the teamwork experiences of students in each modalityhave been documented primarily through evaluative research conducted over short spans oftime and limited by a priori frameworks. The literature also reflects a lack of agreement aboutwhat constitutes the phenomenon of teamwork in each modality. In order to address theselimitations, we conducted a phenomenological study examining the lived experiences ofteamwork among students in both face-to-face and online MBA programs in Iran. Our analysisrevealed striking commonalities in the experiences of both groups, including a shared desirefor effective leadership to alleviate the problem of free riders, as well as substantial time andeffort invested in retaining reliable teammates from one team project to another. In otherrespects, face-to-face and online students’experience differed strongly. For example, whileface-to-face participants pursued teammates with similar beliefs about how teamwork shouldbe accomplished, online participants found themselves pre-occupied with staying connectedwith their teammates and struggled to establish common communication channels with eachand every team member. Overall, our findings suggest that while training and support forstudent teamwork can partly build on the shared needs among students in both modalities, thenature of the experience in each modality may be so different in vital respects that engaging inone mode of teamwork does not necessarily prepare students to participate well in the othermode. Other implications and limitations of the research are discussed