Collaborative Learning In International Interdisciplinary Teams

Teamwork, often distributed across continents and cultures has become a standard in the context of Industry 4.0. To enable students to look beyond their own space, time and culture while resolving specific problems in a specific context makes them more flexible and culturally sensitive and prepares them for collaborative work in their future design practice. The paper discusses key aspects of an online collaborative project developed by students from two design careers, interior design and industrial design, located in two Latin American countries, Mexico and Peru. The study draws upon socio-cultural approaches and deliberates the different dimensions of collaborative work – cognitive, socio-relational and affective. We analysed the individual and shared goals of the collaboration, the roles that each participant played, the specific methods and tools used by the two groups, how knowledge was shared, how problems were negotiated and resolved and how students felt about it. Our main objective is to evaluate how the collaboration impacted students’ learning. Firstly, we focused on students’ performance, the co-created knowledge and the competences developed in the course of collaboration. Secondly, we examine the quality of the design project and correlate it to the effectiveness of the communication in the teams. Research data were collected with student surveys and self-reflection writings carried out at the end of the semester, and comparative study on the intercultural collaborative project outcomes with the outcomes of a traditional in-house team project. The advantages of collaborative learning and the values created are summarized in conclusion.