ABSTRACT

In "Assessment in an Intercultural Virtual Team Project: Building a Culture of Intercultural Learning", Starke-Meyerring and Andrews have presented us with a much needed comprehensive description of the processes of designing virtual teams and the methods for assessing changes in student behavior and knowledge. However, the voices of the students themselves are another important means of assessing the successes of such course linkages. The student biographies generated questions, comments, surprises, and curiosity about their virtual team-mates. Each team then wrote rough drafts of their cell phone instructions, e-mailed them between the two peer-review teams, revised according to suggestions by each team, conducted user testing at their home sites, and turned in their final copy. Students' understanding of all the complexities of stretching beyond their own culture benefits immeasurably from virtual team projects, like the one so fully described in the Starke-Meyerring and Andrews's article.