Benchmarking the World Wide Web in student collaboration

The introduction of new communication technologies such as the World Wide W eb is creating unique opportunities for civil engineering educators to deve lop new classroom collaboration methods, where student teams can interact r emotely in a virtual team environment. Whereas traditional project collabor ation requires regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings, technologies such as the Web are introducing concepts such as asynchronous collaboration, re mote videoconferencing, and centralized information centers. These remote f orms of collaboration introduce a unique set of questions and issues into t he civil engineering domain such as the efficiency of the technology and th e appropriateness of the technology. This paper introduces one approach to examining these issues through the use of benchmarks developed specifically for analyzing remote collaboration within Web-based teams. This paper intr oduces and summarizes results from the first 4 years of a benchmarking stud y focusing on Web-based collaboration technologies within the civil enginee ring classroom.