Telecommunications in Teacher Education: reflections on the first Virtual Team Case Competition

ABSTRACT

In the spring of 1994, the University of Virginia piloted the first Virtual Team Case Competition. This event combined telecommunications and case‐method teaching to promote the use of technology and problem solving among teams of pre‐service teachers from three countries. Participating teams subscribed to a general mailing list to receive instructions, a schedule of events, and a case based on a real classroom situation. Teams had approximately ten days to email their analyses of the case to judges and to administrators of the competition. Judges scored each team's responses to the teaching case and to follow‐up questions and sent their evaluations by private email to the administrators. Results of the competitition were then posted over the mailing list. This paper describes both how the competition worked and what we learned from our experiment with the first Virtual Team Case Competition.