Identifying the issues of team project work for distance education students: a case study in civil engineering

Project based learning has been introduced to a final year structural design course at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) recently and one requirement associated with the project is teamwork. Unfortunately, teamwork is uncommon in the current engineering program at the USQ, mainly due to the fact that around 80% of its students are distance education students. When the design project was given to students at the beginning of the course, the idea of teamwork was welcome. Surprisingly, after the projects were submitted, it was found that most students chose to work individually. An evaluation was then conducted to explore why students chose not to work in teams, and particularly to determine the barriers that prevented it for distance education students. This paper will discuss the analysis of student feedback, compare the responses between distance education and on-campus students and explore potential means of overcoming these issues.