Enhancing entrepreneurial skills through creativity, diversity and collaborative online learning

This paper evaluates staff and students’ perspectives of an entrepreneurial Collaborative Online International Learning [COIL] project that examines students’ creative thinking and practice, whilst working across three different countries, institutions, and educational systems, with the total student body representing multiple nationalities. The diversity of the students’ backgrounds and experiences is at the heart of the paper, which seeks to identify the links between the experiential learning undertaken, the diversity of a group and its subsequent creative outputs. The paper aims to evaluate the extent to which international, online, interdisciplinarity group work fosters creative learning environments, specifically evaluating the effect of an entrepreneurial task, and the impact of differing educational levels, subject fields and location. The ability to work in a heterogeneous team comprising different backgrounds, locations, and practices is a significant challenge for international collaboration online. With increasing literature focusing on authentic assessments, students’ ability to articulate how their learning transfers to the world of work, and the increased importance of students cultivating transferable employability and entrepreneurial skills, including communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, this paper evaluates the extent to which these growing concerns are addressed by COIL projects, using a series of in-depth interviews with the staff and students from all three institutions. COIL projects can offer a valuable addition to curricula of further and higher education institutions with the benefits of internationalisation, cross-cultural communication and teamwork being highlighted within the findings. The key reflections identified that structured communication for staff and students alike is critical to the success of the COIL, without which the students’ ability to create is diminished. Upon evaluation it became clear that whilst COILs are inherently of value in a broader sense, the interdisciplinarity of the students’ subject knowledge itself is a critical factor in determining the success of the project.