Instructional design of an advanced interactive discovery environment: Exploring team communication and technology use in virtual collaborative engineering problem solving

This chapter examines the instructional design of, and reports on research conducted within, a multiuser virtual environment created for a distributed Collaborative Engineering Design (CED) course. The course's Advanced Interactive Discovery Environment (AIDE) provided a variety of synchronous online tools and communication devices to support SameTime virtual team collaboration and problem-solving within the course. The research helped to unpack (1) which tools team members engaged with during collaborative learning activities, (2) how and why they used or did not use provided online features to support their individual learning and enhance team productivity, collaboration, and communication, and (3) how team members communicated socially. The research also describes how different team social communication patterns may be related to the patterns of team technology use. Relevant theoretical frameworks including social learning, media stickiness, cognitive imprinting, and recommendations on how different tools can be effectively integrated into multiuser virtual environments to facilitate learning are discussed.