Benefits and Challenges of Distributed Student Activities in Online Education Settings: Cross-University Collaborations on a Pan-European Level

In this paper we provide the first results obtained from an ongoing project on collaborations between Universities on blended learning courses in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Using a design based research approach, all Universities participating in the pilot co-designed settings on how they will collaborate on a course, relying entirely on online tools and online materials. In total there were seven such cross-University collaboration settings, all of them using different key features, ranging from webinars (virtual classes), collaboration on a specific project, peer-review assignments, exchange of personnel, to an exchange of pedagogical methods. In this paper we report on the outcomes from a workshop in which the impressions from teachers and the students were presented for each collaboration. We analyze what worked well, and what did not, as well as recount he perceived value of the approaches taken by the collaborating Universities.