Developing global teamwork skills: The Runestone project

The Runestone project is a collaborative course currently offered by Universities in Sweden, Finland, and China. The course provides a unique opportunity for third year engineering students from a variety of programs to experience the opportunities and challenges that international teamwork involves. Teams composed of students from two countries work intensively over a 10 to 13 week project cycle to develop a system which allows a user to remote-control a LEGO NXT robot. The teams negotiate the features of their final system with the academic supervisors from the participating Universities, propose a development time-frame and deliverables, and develop and demonstrate a prototype system. This paper uses teaching and learning findings from engineering education research. The evidence is used to arrive at an instructional design that aligns learning outcomes, with instruction and assessment to support student's learning outcomes development throughout the course, We also discuss the evolution of the course over the past 12 years as we moved from a pilot version with eight students from two universities to a large scale course with between sixty and eighty students from between three and five universities distributed over three continents and widely different educational and social cultures.