Introduction to Successful Remote Teamwork

Hello everybody,

welcome to our course "Introduction to Successful Remote Teamwork".
There are many reasons why you want to, or have to work with remote teams. To name just a few:

• Employees ask for home office options,
• You want to save office rent and would prefer your employees work from home,
• Expertise is distributed over various offices of your company, in different locations, different cities, different countries,
• You're working in a project consortium with partners in different locations.

Remote teamwork comes with many opportunities, but also comes with many challenges.
In this course, we provide an overview on several aspects, technical, organizational and intercultural.

In Week 1, we'll focus on the technical aspects. The main question is which tools are available to support your remote teams.

Our videos will not give you predefined solutions. We rather intend to raise questions as discussion triggers so that we jointly can collect and discuss available tools.

Next to this, we offer you the chance to experience working in a remote team yourself. For this purpose, you'll have to register for the team assignment here. Please read about what you'll have to expect here and here.

All you need to know for the team task, will be covered in Week 1 and 2. Week 3 covers intercultural competence, a topic that is only marginally important for the team assignment. Week 4 does not provide any new content, it is just for you to work with your team.
Furthermore, there will be an exam in this week covering the topics of all three weeks. As in most of our courses, we'll allow you to work on the exam for another week after the official course end. In this week you'll also have to review and grade the work of three other teams. Reviewing and grading the work of other teams is not a team task but an individual task. Nevertheless, it is an integral part of the peer assessment, which is used to grade the submissions of the teams. In other words: if you do not review the work of other teams, you'll receive no points for the work of your team as well. This does not affect the grade of your teammates, as long as they themselves have fulfilled their reviewing duties.

To receive a Record of Achievement in this course, you'll have to

• write a short self reflection about bad team experiences at work or in university (1%). This task is a pre-requisite to be admitted for the team assignment.
• create a team profile (Team Assignment - Part 1: 14%)
• help Alex to grow his company (Team Assignment - Part 2: 30%)
• pass the course exam (55%)

Finally, here's a list of the course's most important deadlines.

• Submission of self-reflection: 08.10.2019
• Team registration: 08.10.2019
• Submission of team profile: 15.10.2019
• Submission of pitch to help Alex grow his company: 29.10.2019
• Peer review and final exam: 06.11.2019

In case of unpredictable circumstances, these dates might be subject to change. In this case the dates that are set for the corresponding item, override the dates that are given here.

So, welcome again. We're looking forward to discuss with you. Good luck and enjoy.

Hanadi, Tom, and Salim