This is not surprising for a paper in an introductory course, given the students' time constraints. Moving this exercise to a more advanced class might be helpful. 4.4 Research Perspective Technical problems create even greater problems for researchers. Most comparative studies would require good control over the communications medium. But the Internet is still difficult for some to use, particularly with text-based interfaces.
Timing is also a problem.
Messages between our universities typically take a few minutes, but sometimes take hours and once took several days. One advantage is that most systems allow automatic logging of both incoming and outgoing messages. Doing so without the knowledge of the subjects would not be ethically acceptable to most researchers. But students could be asked to review these files and provide some summary information. Programs could be written to gather some data, again with permission of the students.