Strategies and guidelines for building effective distributed learning teams in higher education

The paper describes the strategies and guidelines for building effective global student teams based on the experiences obtained from six global software development projects involving 438 students from the universities in the US, Panama, UK, and Turkey. According to the findings obtained from these projects, the factors affecting online collaboration and the problems faced during management of projects are given in the paper. It is hoped that these findings will help to instructors to design and manage globally distributed student teams. The paper also provides guidelines for students to become a good team player.