A Collaborative Online Project between New Zealand and New York

Two online collaborative assignments that connected students in courses at Unitec, New Zealand, and Baruch College, City University of New York, are the focus of this article. For the first assignment, small, blended groups used five different online techniques to explore topics being discussed in an intercultural communication course at each university. In the second assignment, student teams discussed a case study posted online and produced a collaborative report on their findings. Both assignments were designed to enhance student learning in business communication through computer-mediated communication (CMC) and diverse team building. In this article, the authors first discuss their rationale and goal for this online collaborative project. They then describe how they implemented and evaluated the two assignments, and summarize student recommendations for further replication.