Teamwork is an integral component of any engineering degree, but students often have difficulty organising team meetings outside of class times due to discrepancies in their individual study timetables as well as their family and work commitments. Rich-media synchronous online technologies such as video/web conferencing and virtual worlds can be used to help address this problem by enabling anyplace, anytime interaction, while at the same time mirroring the communication modes students will encounter in their future workplaces. However, not much is known about how these technologies compare with one another for facilitating different types of collaborative learning task and in terms of their student-perceived affordances.
