Technology choices to support international online collaboration

Abstract

Postgraduate business students participated in an international, fully-online collaboration pilot, focused on cultural intelligence skills needed to successfully navigate the global business world. Student projects utilized a transferrable learning design, with a changeable central case study posing challenges around (in this case) managing cross-cultural teams. This paper focuses on the learning design and choice of technologies to facilitate online collaboration. The combination of using new technology, and quickly developing relationships with counterparts from across the world, proved challenging for both staff and students. However, students quickly adapted, and strategically used the technologies to efficiently collaborate, albeit in ways different to the project l;eader(s expectations. Overall, the project provided an opportunity for students to network with students from other countries on real-world issues, and gain familiarity with technologies used by multi-national corporations.