Title : Teamwork in doing courses project among the Electrical Computer Engineering students in IIUM.

INTRODUCTION Engineering is by native a collaborative process and most production system are designs by teams working over long period of time (Lingard and Shan Barkataki 2011). Engineers are synonym working in group rather than individual because it makes much easier for them to find the solution when problems occur or brainstorming great ideas when inventing products. As stated by Lingard and Shan Barkataki (2011),nowadays, in industry, most of the employers want to employ graduates that not only have an excellent achievement in academic but also in skills, especially in teamwork and communication skills (p.F1C-1). Realizing this fact, the Electrical Computer Engineering Department (ECE) of International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) has tried to assimilate the teamwork skills among their students through their courses project. In this department, it consists of two majoring programs, which are Communication Engineering and Electronics-Computer Information Engineering. The courses for these two majoring cover electrical, electronics, computer software and hardware and networking field. Most of the courses that need to be fulfilled by students are critical and complex, thus theoretical knowledge itself is not sufficient for students to understand them. To assist the students, the department had come out with teamwork based project as one of the teaching or learning methodology in most their courses including the laboratory classes. Using this approach, the courses such as Software Engineering (ECE 3212), Signal and System (ECE 2221),and VLSI(ECE 4141),are just not focusing on the theoretical understanding among students but also their practical understanding and polishing their teamwork skill. Students are required to work in-group or team; performing mini projects associated with the courses, they had learned . The mini project for the courses could be in many different possibilities, such as computer simulation, programming, circuit or system design, software development, presentation, report writing and many more. However, the effectiveness of this learning approach, especially in developing the teamwork skill among the students of the ECE department is still not clearly being stated. The response from the students and the outcomes from this teams project are needed to justify it. Thus the aims and the objectives for this study are, 1) To determine and evaluate the level of teamwork among the ECE students in performing their courses project. 2) To determine the effectiveness of courses projects approach towards the teamwork among ECE students. Keywords: courses project, teamwork, ECE