| Abstrakt: |
International teamwork is a skill valued by employers with a global footprint. Development of the engineering workforce to meet the demands of an increasingly global industry includes skills beyond the mastering of the technical content. In this project, we connected groups from Clemson University (CU) in the US and ITESO Guadalajara in Mexico in a 9-week project to engineer a process to manufacture a commemorative Tequila bottle. We picked a Tequila bottle to emphasize its cultural background, degree of spread around the world, and familiarity to the students. All activities were online, and the project was framed as COIL. The course in CU, of 34 mechanical engineering majors, was Manufacturing Processes and their Applications; the course at ITESO, of 22 students total with 14 industrial engineering and the rest business administration majors, was Manufacturing Services and Strategies. The course was required for graduation for all engineering majors and optional for business majors. The project was split into 5 major team deliverables, mapping a COIL framework as follows: in week 1, emphasizing team building and the development of trust; in weeks 2, 3 and 5, comparative discussion, team organization; and in week 9, collaborative project work. Different speakers from industry facilitated discussion on international teamwork and supply chain. There were individual reflections in week 1 and 9, before and after the project. Assessment was done through these student reflections; as well as student reflections and course evaluations at the end of the semester when they compared the international project to other aspects of the class. In this presentation, we will report the analysis of the perspectives from the students, lessons learned, and plans to make this type of project scalable to larger classrooms, given the expected increase in size of the groups in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
