Students International Collaboration Projects (SICP): A Cross-Cultural Project Using Virtual Teams to Learn Communication Styles

Abstract

“SICP” stands for Students International Collaboration Project. This chapter describes a project where students create learning with faculty mentors, offering insights into problem solving. Achieving the freedom to learn and broaden students’ individual interpersonal skills is the main goal for this new endeavor. This chapter will explain SICP’s mission and its procedures, analyze its main concepts, and describe the outcomes. Experiences of past projects in the learning curve will be used to give a practical framework for teachers who would be interested in initiating such a project, not only for their students but also for themselves. The prototype combined French and American teams who wrote a research paper together. The learned outcomes focused on improved communication skills and team management. In the process, the students also learned about a different culture. This mentoring process constitutes an opportunity for teachers to stimulate learning by involving students in a shared responsibility experience. This project expands traditional classroom learning into an experiential process to learn new concepts.