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Abstract
A team-based mechanical engineering design course at Stanford University has been expanded to include a new set of students attending remotely from industry. Because this class is centered on collaborative team experiences, it requires a degree of interactivity beyond what can be provided by periodic lecture transmissions. The World-Wide Web has been adopted as an artificial backbone in service of social exchange, and its use in facilitating project-team formation is examined. Once the technological hurdle is overcome, socio-cultural differences between the university environment and workplace emerge as main barriers to successful peer-interaction.

Introduction
ME210: Mechatronic Systems Design, is a graduate-level engineering design class offered by Stanford University's Department of Mechanical Engineering. For more than ten years, ME210 has provided an environment for 10-15 three-person teams to engage in a range of industry-sponsored projects. The educational goal of this course is to create a shared learning experience in collaborative mechatronic product design and development. Student teams benefit directly from working with a $10,000 design budget on their sponsored project, and indirectly from the design experiences of peer project teams.

In Autumn 1994, ME210 took on the new challenge of being offered concurrently to both traditional campus students and Honors Co-op students via Stanford Instructional Television Network (SITN). These non-traditional students are typically employees of large companies who reduce their workload to take classes concurrently at Stanford in pursuit of a post-Bachelors degree. Depending on company resources, such students may watch the class via television broadcast, with or without audio response capability, or watch the class by videotape one week after the actual lecture. Though it is not uncommon at Stanford to have such hybrid arrangements for televised lecture courses, ME210 is unique in being centered on the group experience. Compared to a traditional course, the bulk of learning comes from in-depth interaction with peers rather than digesting and regurgitating lecture content.

Table 1 shows a breakdown of students in the Autumn class of '94. Based on lifestyle and communications needs, we distinguish between four types: traditional students who live on campus; traditional students who commute; SITN students in the San Francisco Bay Area (local to Stanford); and out-of-state SITN students (in Massachusetts and Oregon).

In the preceding year, we were fortunate to have already experimented using the World-Wide Web (WWW) when the class was only offered to traditional students [1] . This hybrid environment prompted as to take the leap, and hypothesize the feasibility of supporting team-based classroom activities across a distance, using WWW as a "social backbone. " In lieu of paper handouts, E-mail and the Web became baseline communication tools, and access to both were proclaimed prerequisites for taking the course. Specialized tools were then built on top of WWW to support both micro-level team communications [2] as well as macro-level team management.

The focus of this paper is on the macro-level activity of project team formation, something usually glossed over by faculty, but given significant weighting by students. Exactly how to do this in a hybrid classroom, where 30% of the class is usually invisible, presents the core challenge. In what follows, we will describe the ME210 class-philosophy behind team formation, how the Web has been used to support self-formed teams in recent years, and lessons learned from these experiences.

Team Formation Philosophy
Central to ME210's educational mission is the belief that engineering design is fundamentally a social activity. To exercise this claim, students work with a range of peers through several mini-projects prior to selecting year-long teams. Bidding for projects follows after team formation. While teams for mini-projects are assembled by the teaching team, final team formation is student initiated, with staff intervention only in cases of indecisiveness.

To sensitize students to individual differences in cognitive style, each student is asked to take a team formation questionnaire (based loosely on the Meyers-Briggs test) which broadly classifies students into three cognitive polarities - North, East, and West [3]. They are then encouraged to maximize team diversity based on this test, gender and ethnicity. Aside from this recommendation, our stance on team formation has been laissez-faire, which results in greater sense of self-determination for students with initiative. Historically, however, about a quarter of the class remains unteamed by the deadline, requiring the staff to step in and make systematic assignments. It was felt that this situation could be improved by providing access to more information on student backgrounds. This formed the starting point for our first experiment with the WWW.

Year 1: Uncovering the Need for Live Data
We first experimented using the WWW in Autumn 1993, when ME210 was still offered only to traditional students, and nobody in the class had prior knowledge of the Web. Students were asked to submit "self-marketing pitches" to the teaching team via e-mail. Each "pitch" was to be fashioned after a resume, to answer the basic question, "Why would you want me on your team?" After all pitches had been received, they were manually converted to HTML and put on the Web for perusal, cross indexed by name, photo, and Meyers-Briggs results. A survey was administered on the day teams proposals were due, and positive responses were elicited from 70% of the students. Relative to the preceding year, students were better prepared to form teams by the deadline and fewer students required less last-minute match-making from the staff.

The major gain from this experiment, however, was not in what worked, but what did not. A particular failure mode of our pilot system was the lack of input ability, due to forms capability still being unavailable on Mosaic for the Macintosh. Because a need arose for students to identify project interests, a paper sign-up sheet, one of which is shown in Figure 1, was put together and taped to the back door of the lab. This simple tool overcame existing limitations of the Web, and become the first interactive tool for identifying potential team members.

Figure 1. Paper Sign-Up Sheet used in ME210 93-94 Team Formation

Figure 2 WWW Project Interests Plaza Used in ME210 94-95

Automated Resume Posting
Students post their resumes to the 210 Web by sending e-mail to a special address. Upon receiving the message and finding the word "resume" in the subject header, a special script translates the resume into HTML (HyperText Markup Language) format, creates a file in the appropriate directory, and updates the student index page to add a new hypertext link to the resume. Information on the resume page can be updated at any time by following the same procedure over again.

Project Interest Plaza
The Project Interest Plaza, shown in Figure 2, is an electronic equivalent of the paper interest form generated by students in the preceding year. Students may log in and check off project interests via a checkbox interface shown in Figure 3. Upon submission, the list page is dynamically updated to show who's interested in what. Appended to each student name is auxiliary data on Meyers-Briggs results, and whether or not the student is an SITN student. This provides a quick means of ruling out potential mismatches.

Figure 3. Project Interest Submission Form

Figure 4. Team Proposal Form

Figure 5. Proposed Teams Page

Lessons Learned
Our goal in implementing Internet tools for team formation was to eliminate spatial inequities inherent in a hybrid classroom. The hypothesis was that such tools could enable the same, if not better, degree of peer interactivity characteristic of a physically co-located classroom. While the issue of distance was successfully peeled away, we've discovered a larger set of problems rooted in cultural differences between academia and the workplace. At the risk of over-generalizing beyond our particular experience at Stanford, we offer the following lessons for consideration:

1. Pay Attention to Differences b/t the College Clock and the Work Clock
Most of the teams formed over the weekend, when SITN students were resting. As a result, the unteamed people as of Monday morning were predominantly SITN students. Since traditional students work over the weekend, while SITN students treat weekends as "normal" people, they missed an important opportunity to form teams.

2. Establish Common Ground in Internet Access Frequency and Capability
In spite of recent Internet press-coverage, the University environment (at least that of Stanford) remains blessed with far more connectivity and stability than commercial firms. We learned too late, that many company connections to the Internet were less stable than desired, and many messages often did not reach SITN students in spite of claiming to have Internet access. Another reason SITN students were left in the cold was by being inaccessible to traditional students, typically having longer response times than traditional students when responding to e-mail. End-quarter feedback found that SITN students were considered less available, and thus less trust-worthy as partners. One way to minimize this perception is to manage realistic excepctations of response time up front, as a function of work environment and communication tools.

Acknowledgements
We thank all students of ME210 who have gone through the team selection process, with special thanks to those whose names appear in our examples. This research was supported under the ARPA-funded SHARE Project, a collaboration between Stanford University's Center for Design Research and Menlo Park-based Enterprise Integration Technologies.

References
1 Hong, J., Toye G., Leifer, L. Using the WWW for a Team-Based Engineering Design Class, Electronic Proceedings of the 2nd WWW Conference, http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/Educ/hong/hong.html, Chicago, IL, October, 1994.

2 Hong,J., Toye, G., Leifer, L., PENS: Personal Electronic Notebook with Sharing, Submitted to the Fourth IEEE Workshop on Enabling Technologies, Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, April 20-22, 1995

3 Wilde, D. "Mathematical Resolution of MBTI Creativity Data into Personality Type Components," ASME Design Theory and Methodology DE-Vol 53. 1993, pp. 37-43.