What Does the World Need Today From Engineers?
The complex, diverse, and interconnected challenges confronting the world, including climate disasters, increasing humanitarian crises, a contracting global economy due to the COVID-19 health crisis, and the imperative of finding more sustainable ways to generate economic prosperity and improve the planet, have raised profound questions for every profession. Tackling such challenges requires a multidisciplinary as well as an international collaborative approach.
Engineering educators are concerned with preparing 21st century engineers for what is likely to be a critical time in history, as they are traditionally the problem solvers of society—inventing solutions, innovating, and advancing the frontiers of what can be done in any given domain. As the world turns the corner into this new millennium, there will be a huge need for engineers who can think globally, act locally, and work together in responding to the world’s problems. The increasingly global nature of the engineering profession will require future engineers who can work on global engineering projects, within multidisciplinary teams, solve complex humanitarian problems, design products with cultural aesthetic specifications, meet with international clients, embark on international assignments, and collaborate with multicultural virtual team members (Chaudhury et al., 2019; Mariasingam et al., 2008; OECD/Asia Society, 2018). Beyond engineering domain knowledge and technical skills, students require global and intercultural competencies as well as collaboration skills to succeed in an evolving 21st century workplace and a progressively diverse and interdependent global economy (Downey et al., 2006; Winberg et al., 2020).
In response, we developed the Global Virtual Team (GVT) project comprising international cross-institutional research project teams of engineering students in collaboration with faculty at partner universities around the world. The geographically distributed students were engaged in collaborative online intercultural learning around technical engineering projects in a GVT environment aimed at enhancing students’ international exposure, global awareness, and intercultural experience. This study examined the intercultural learning program conducted via a GVT project environment from the perspectives of both the multidisciplinary engineering students and the educators. This project took strides toward a fuller understanding of engineering students’ ideas regarding intercultural factors in virtual team collaborations. The research took advantage of a new global engineering program located within a university in Canada, in which students from various nations collaborated in virtual teams on engineering projects. Ironically, this program was in the making several years before the current pandemic, which has rapidly coerced engineering work into virtual spaces and formats. Given the program’s focus on international collaboration, the authors asked questions about intercultural factors to create an intervention that targeted such knowledge and team dynamics.