Development of contemporary leadership capacity through teamwork in an online environment

The Internet has emerged as a mainstream communication medium, resulting in the development of new educational opportunities for teaching and learning. This article describes and evaluates a learning opportunity which used a Wiki technology to support an aligned assessment activity which was focused around teamwork and students construction of learning materials. One of the learning outcomes in the unit in which the activity sits is to develop teamwork; consequently, the team product and the team process was the unit of analysis, not individual student product or process. Analysis of student to student communications and individual student reflections identified that students enjoyed the work and that during the exercise they identified aspects such as planning, communication and shared leadership-working to areas of individual strengths-were important in the process. The activity indicates that online technologies such as Wikis may facilitate assessment of affective outcomes such as teamwork and underpin development of students' leadership capacity.