When I think about collaborative learning approach, the first tool that came across my mind is e-mail. This tool is still predominant in almost all of the learning phenomenon across the world. During my initial days of higher education, we used to have group work as an assignments for courses. These groups assignments are performed by each of us individually by dividing into sub-tasks and the whole assignment is submitted by collecting their contributions via email and submit to the facilitator. I guess, that is the initial steps for me as a collaborative learning approach, kind of.

However, this structure seems to have a collaborative work, it doesn’t feel like learning approach. I find it rather one-directional in a way that my learning was not improved due to following reasons (few more by Robert and McInnerny, 2007):

• read or process the information by other group members
• get a review of my contribution
• revise my contribution by improving my learning
• forget and didn’t even recall the assignments that were submitted

Due to the following reasons, it become apparent that most of the students that were graduated didn’t understand the value of collaborative approach in the real world and tend to tumble. They probably work in their specific core groups of similar research topic and they were unable to grasp the problem holistic and difficult to collaborate with other multidisciplinary groups. They might understood the hard way to discuss and learn with diverse disciplines by forceful intent from the top management and compromise because of lack of funding. This silos approach will also result in solving multidisciplinary problems in real world such as circular economy, sustainability, epidemics (Corona Virus) and multinational co-operation. The root cause of this approach lies in the education system (Mason and Moutahir, 2006).

When I was introduced to real collaborative learning during later phases of research and education, I beginning to realize that the structure of group needs to be changed to collaborative group work. To discuss it ways to transform the collaborative learning, our group has provided with the similar scenario in the Open Networked Learning course #ONL201. The outcome of the group activity can be found in Mural.

We identified and categorized the main drawbacks of the traditional group work setup as motivation and course design. By working with a group of varied competence and skilled participants, I came to know about various learning course design principles that will adhere the students to be part of collaborative learning. A summary of these toolkits are listed below

• ABC Learning design: A toolkit for curriculum development for collaborative learning that consists of workshops, learning principles and online activities.
• ADDIE model: A generic process traditionally used by instructional designers and training developers which has five phases—Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation.
• CLA Toolkit: A curated tools and resources on Collaborating, Learning and Adapting to help you plan and implement Program Cycle activities more effectively.

The important aspect of course design that makes the student to involve the process of collaborative learning is Assessment. Students need to be assessed based on both individual performance and active involvement in the group work to get the final grade. We discussed various methods to solve this issue in above link.

Another important is aspect to involve the collaborative learning is to get proper motivation. In fact, there is lack of motivation not only at the student’s level but also at the institution and teacher’s level. The ways to motivate the learning community within an institution is to provide a overview of strengths and weakness of this new type of learning to get the overall picture of how can it be incorporated into the curriculum.

“Corona effect: A shift in Physical distancing to digital acquaintance”

Due to current pandemic issues, we are moving into a digital phase. Though most of the digital natives are comfortable with this change, the digital naive are finding to difficult to adopt the current paradigm shift and probably this will be motivation to get acquainted with digital tools and increase their digital literacy. Almost all schools and universities are moving toward online courses and our group’s previous work on SWOT analysis for MOOCs might be useful for getting digital.

Probably, it is also a good time to enter into transition phase in online collaborative learning. There are several open and proprietary online platforms and tools that facilitate the collaborative learning approach such as Google, Microsoft, Miro, Mural, etc. During our group experience in Mural, we came to realize the potential possibilities to learn through collaboration lens effectively where there are ways to solve the aforementioned reasons that I came across during my higher education (Shonfeld, 2019). However, still there are some disadvantages of collaborative learning that needs to be taken care of during implementation (Bishnoi, 2017).

“Multidisciplinary problems require multidisciplinary solutions”

Though Corona virus a majorly a research oriented toward Virology, the handling of this issue needs multidisciplinary approach (Holmes, et al, 2020). To flatten the curve and save the humanity, the strategy of testing and cure is not sufficient. It needs support from various disciplines such as:

• medical experts: to characterize, identify and develop vaccines
• pharmacy: to produce vaccinations in large scale
• government: to create policies and distributing vaccines to most of the people who need care
• technology: to track and create a database to conduct analysis on detection and prevention of virus
• management: handling of social structure through adopt right kind of policies at right time
• psychology: to handle psychological issues during this pandemic situation
• transport: improve in supply chain management and reaching the personnel and material to reach higher risk groups, etc..

In order to accomplish this kind of multidisciplinary approach, several institutes are already formed teams that must be solved in urgent basis such as Cornell university, DFG, EU, etc.. To facilitate this research, online collaboration learning is necessary because of time, cost, travel and physical distancing constraints that we are presently dealing with. Hopefully, this is a triggering point for transitioning towards more future collaborations to eradicate these kind of holistic sustainable problems and save humanity.