Understanding Students’ Online Learning Experiences in Virtual Teams

As distance education becomes increasingly popular, instructors and administrators are working hard to improve students’ online learning experience. Although, the dynamics of online learning experiences in an educational setting have been well studied, the use of virtual teams presents a set of problems in relation to how physical, temporal and social separation of learners affect learners’ learning processes. This paper is a case study reporting an action research project investigating the experiences of using virtual teams in a new Organisational Psychology unit at a regional Australian university. Online group challenges were identified with potential solutions to these challenges trialed during the action research cycle.