VCL-Transfer

The participants should be encouraged to actively use the experience and skills they have. The organisers are free to decide to make the participants’ previous experience one of the criteria of the team assignment. As personal experience of the participants is in many cases closely connected to their institutional affiliation (participants from one institution are often students from the same programme, they have taken similar courses and are on a similar level), it is often taken into account indirectly. Making it an explicit criterion of team assignment can be done for following reasons:

• Simulation of communication problems between two disciplines
  To prepare students for future interdisciplinary cooperation, it is possible to set up groups where students from different disciplines have to work side-by-side. Each discipline has its own academic culture, including its own vocabulary, methods, and approaches. Because these are used as implicit foundation for communication with members of the same discipline, students can experience communication problems when working with members of other disciplines. Members of different disciplines will further have different views and approaches to the same problem. Specifically creating groups with participants from multiple disciplines can simulate future cooperation scenarios and help students learn to deal with communication problems in a controlled environment.
• Ensure the use of diverse methods
  The task can be founded on an area that requires the use of methods or approaches from several disciplines (e.g. an e-Learning tasks will need expertise from both education and computer science). If the groups are to solve such tasks, they have to command skills from all the areas in question.

In the above mentioned two cases, expertise needs to be an explicit criterion of the group assignment. Especially in the letter case (need for multidisciplinary methods), it is advisable to take expertise into account also in the role design by connecting expertise to specific roles.

In order to take participants’ expertise into account, it has to be known. In some cases, it is reasonable to make assumptions, e.g. based on the study programme of the participants. Special expertise (such as working experience, special interests) needs to be described by the participants themselves. If the expertise is connected to the role concept, such descriptions can be a part of a role application.

Organization of the Team Assignment
Management of Roles