Facilitating Collaborative Learning among Businesses, Faculty, and Students in a Purely Online Setting

Collaborative learning is a situation where two or more people attempt to learn together. We explain how we designed and facilitated collaborative learning among businesses, faculty, and students in a purely online setting during strict lockdowns during COVID-19. The design follows the four areas involving successful collaborative learning: initial conditions, collaboration roles, the scaffolding of interactions, and interaction monitoring and regulation. The course followed a blend of professional consulting engagements, student internships, and faculty externships. The primary discipline serving as the basis for the consulting engagements is business analytics, which covers various computer programming, statistics, and data visualization skills. While the overall program spans multiple academic terms, this paper focuses on the pilot term consisting of chosen business management students interested in programming and analytics. Despite logistical challenges and apprehensions among student participants in the middle of the term, the results were in line with generally expected learning outcomes based on feedback from the participants.