Self-paced course

Introduction to Successful Remote Teamwork

Offered by Thomas Staubitz, Hanadi Traifeh, Salim Chujfi

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Tele-working is becoming a more and more popular topic amongst modern organizations.
However, it also comes with some challenges for both: tele-workers and management.
This course will make you and your team fit for virtual collaboration in geographically distributed contexts. You will learn about the benefits and risks of driving a virtual team culture and how guided remote work drives to success. Furthermore, you will learn how to use intercultural competences as a key factor of interaction and communication. In the hands-on part of the course you will learn how to select appropriate online collaboration tools and how to employ them in a practical task. Working with a “real life” virtual team, you will gain first-hand experience about the opportunities and challenges of tele-working.

Self-paced since October 30, 2019
Language: English
English
Advanced, Beginner, Professional Skills

Course information

Tele-working is becoming a more and more popular topic amongst modern organizations.
However, it also comes with some challenges for both: tele-workers and management.
This course will make you and your team fit for virtual collaboration in geographically distributed contexts. You will learn about the benefits and risks of driving a virtual team culture and how guided remote work drives to success. Furthermore, you will learn how to use intercultural competences as a key factor of interaction and communication. In the hands-on part of the course you will learn how to select appropriate online collaboration tools and how to employ them in a practical task. Working with a “real life” virtual team, you will gain first-hand experience about the opportunities and challenges of tele-working.

Course characteristics:

  • Language: English
  • Starting from: October 02, 2019
  • Course end: October 30, 2019
  • Duration: 4 weeks (3-6 hours per week)
  • Target group:
    • Professionals working from remote
    • Lower management
    • Middle and senior management
    • Professionals working from remote (tele-workers)
    • Researchers working in international projects
    • Everybody who is interested in collaborating with remote partners
  • Course requirements: none

You will need some extra time after the course to review the work of the other teams and to rate your reviews.
Please, see the following timeline for the tentative dates:

Project timeline

Join openHPI's official Twitter Feed: @openHPI. Use the hashtag #teleworking2019 to join and contribute to social media conversations about this course.
Additional video lecturing material can be found at www.tele-task.de .

Course contents

  • Pre-Course Survey

  • Week 1:

    We will discuss the meaning of remote work and contexts in which it is appropriate or not. Furthermore, we will discuss the reliability of remote work for organizations, including infrastructure and data protection issues. Finally, we will introduce a set of tools that might come handy for the practical tasks in this course as well as for your daily 'remote working' life.
  • Team Assignment:

    The course will be accompanied by some practical tasks to get used to the introduced tools and techniques.
  • Week 2:

    During this week, we focus on "The human side of the remote work" and we will particularly consider two aspects that help defining how the management of the remote environment can be addressed. We first consider characteristics of personal profiles in order to build and empower remote teams. In addition to that, we also define some guidelines to understand the dimension of the remote interaction and how can organisations successfully overcome the challenges of the remote environment.
  • Week 3:

    During this week, we will get to learn about the meaning of “intercultural competence” and why it is important to have such a competence nowadays; especially when working in a remote team. We will also introduce the different elements of intercultural competence and go through some exercises that help us better understand our own culture, as well as other cultures.
  • Week 4:

    The focus of this week is already on your hands-on work in the project. We hope for interesting discussions about your experiences. You will have additional time after the "official" end of the course to finalize your project submissions.
  • Final Exam

  • I like, I wish:

    Please give us your feedback

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Learners

Current
Today
5,571
Course End
Oct 30, 2019
2,991
Course Start
Oct 02, 2019
2,327

Rating

This course was rated with 4.67 stars in average from 6 votes.

Certificate Requirements

  • Gain a Record of Achievement by earning at least 40% of the maximum number of points from all graded assignments.
  • Gain a Confirmation of Participation by completing at least 50% of the course material.
  • Gain an Open Badge by completing the course.

Find out more in the certificate guidelines.

This course is offered by

Dr. Thomas Staubitz

Dr. Thomas Staubitz is a Senior Lecturer at the Internet Technologies and Systems group of Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam. His general research topics are in the area of eLearning and MOOCs. A particular focus is on collaboration and interaction among course participants and assessment strategies beyond multiple-choice quizzes.

Hanadi Traifeh

Hanadi Traifeh is a Design Thinking researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute and a Design Thinking coach at the HPI School Design Thinking. Her primary research interests include the digital transformation of education, learner-centric education design, and the effective use of Design Thinking in education. She led and contributed to the design and implementation of several educational and capacity building programmes around the world for organizations that include the University of Cambridge, BBC World Trust, the International Development Research Centre of Canada, and the World Affairs Council of North California. ​ Hanadi holds an MA in Fine Arts from the University of Wales (UK) and a Certificate in Instructional Design from George Brown College (Canada).​

Salim Chujfi

Salim Chujfi is an entrepreneur who has been re-thinking the telecommunications business with disruptive technical innovations during the last 20 years. He has developed his professional career mainly in organizations in the Petroleum/Gas and Telecommunications business in Latin America and Europe. Thanks to his academic background as Systems Engineer with a degree of Master of Science in Technology Management, Salim has designed innovative Cloud-based services offering teleworking solutions to a wide variety of industries including Financial Services, Automobile, Health Care, Energy and Travelling.

Salim is co-founder and CEO/CTO at Sabienzia Technologies, a German based organization leader in the field of teleworking and cloud service solutions. Thanks to their unique cloud-based services, Sabienzia manages the biggest pool of teleworkers in Germany enabling secure and decentralized workplaces meeting the high security standards required by the Federal Data Protection authorities in Germany. Salim is currently also a regular contributor and adviser in technologies, security and telecommunication for organizations including the Deutsche Welle.

Since 2013, Salim joined the researching team at Hasso Plattner Institute – HPI – in Potsdam, where he combines practical and academic experiences designing the working environments of the future. At HPI his research includes the development of cognitive frameworks for decentralized working environments to improve individual’s performance and effectiveness overcoming the lack of face-to-face communication. He also proposes assessment taxonomies to analyze online comportment at the levels of the individual and community, in order to successfully identify characteristics to help evaluate higher effectiveness of communication and develop potential collective intelligence models.