Principle 5: Collaboration

By MEd. Andrea Rodríguez V.

Collaboration is the basis for bringing together the knowledge, experience and skills of multiple team members to contribute to the development of a new product more effectively than individual team members performing their narrow tasks in support of product development. As such collaboration is the basis for concepts such as concurrent engineering or integrated product development.

Effective collaboration requires actions on multiple fronts:

• Early involvement and the availability of resources to effectively collaborate
• A culture that encourages teamwork, cooperation and collaboration
• Effective teamwork and team member cooperation
• Defined team member responsibilities based on collaboration
• A defined product development process based on early sharing of informatin and collaboratin
• Collocation or virtual collocation
• Collaboration technology 

Some of the strategies that help students complete a task together are:

• Group work in which students complete a task together
• Pair work in which students share ideas
• Peer review in which students anlyze and comment on one another´s written work
• Buddy journals through which students write on possibly assigned topics