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1. Introduction
Providing information technology (IT) students with teamwork skills is becoming increasingly crucial for preparing them to succeed in today’s complex and knowledge-driven economy and society. Effective teamwork requires knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) in a set of diverse areas including leadership, communication, group decision-making, negotiation skills, conflict resolution, team motivation, social skills, understanding of diversity, responsibility and accountability. Teamwork is ubiquitous in engineering and IT classrooms. Instructors use teamwork not only in class projects that aim to mimic real-life problems but also as a learning paradigm (collaborative learning). The accreditation boards, such as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), Inc. and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), require evidence that students are acquiring teamwork KSAs. Employers continuously rank the ability to work in a team setting as among the most important attributes that they look for in new graduates.
Even after a decade of steady growth, enrollments in the US online higher education programs continue to increase according to a report periodically published by Babson Survey Research Group (Allen and Seaman, 2014). The expansion of online education has brought new challenges for teaching and assessing teamwork KSAs. One of the concerns is that online programs emphasize technical skills but overlook the professional skills development of students to some degree (Pienaar et al., 2015; Barberà et al., 2014). While online and face-to-face programs are frequently compared in the literature regarding their educational quality and student learning in their respective academic domains or specific hard skills, the question of whether online and face-to-face students have differences in soft skills development has not attracted the same attention. Meanwhile, employers still have negative perceptions about online programs, which is in part because of the preconception that online students lack soft skills that are cultivated by face-to-face interactions (Adams, 2008; Grossman and Johnson, 2015; Stewart and Khare, 2018). This pre-notion is not grounded in empirical data, as the literature lacks studies comparing soft skills of face-to-face and online students. However, it should be noted that several studies suggest that face-to-face soft skill training programs are more effective than online ones (Doo, 2006; Piyawan et al., 2016).
Researchers discuss that integrating teamwork into online classes can increase students’ teamwork KSAs as...