Course content

The course starts with key Collaborative Working Environment (CWE) definitions and covers the following main themes: Industrial collaboration challenges, collaboration between small and large companies, collaboration management, human factors, trust and security, roles, training, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, CWE technology overview, collaborative performance including effectiveness and efficiency, ROI approaches and collaboration diagnostics, collaboration strategies, technology trends, user interfaces and technology limitations. The course encourages the use of multiple perspectives for improved consistency; strategy / organisation / end user requirements / solution / service concept.

Learning outcome

Knowledge:
The course presents research results demonstrating how collaboration should be considered critical for competitiveness and business performance for knowledge- and coordination intensive businesses, why collaboration is important for engineers, what should be done to enable communication and collaboration in typical engineering organisations and how common challenges should be addressed.

Skills:
Learning how to evaluate, prepare for, introduce and use new collaboration technologies in distributed teams. Exercises and the project assignment provide practical skills in the main themes covered in the course.

General competence:
After completing the course, the students shall be able to provide professional advice on how to identify collaboration barriers and systematically improve collaboration in knowledge intensive businesses.

Learning methods and activities

Lectures, exercises and team assignments using collaboration tools and analytics frameworks. Project teams are established at the beginning of the semester. The final examination requires approved project work. The project is graded and counts 40% of the final grade. If significant differences in the contributions from group members have been documented, individual adjustment of final grading may be considered. The lectures may be grouped in a few larger blocks during the semester, and a schedule for this will be set up at the beginning of the semester. The lectures and exercises are offered in English when students who do not speak Norwegian take the course. If the teaching is given in English the Examination papers will be given in English only. Students are free to choose Norwegian or English for written assessments. If there is a re-sit examination, the examination form may be changed from written to oral.

Compulsory assignments

• Project
• Exercises

Recommended previous knowledge

None.

Course materials

Information is provided at the start of the semester.