Onboarding Challenges in Online and Blended Courses: Reviewing Virtual Cross-Country Collaboration of Student Teams in Higher Education

The proliferation of international online collaboration in higher education as part of the curriculum raises questions of how to successfully start these online courses and prepare student teams to effectively work on a project over the course of the semester in a virtual environment. Our paper aims to analyse the possibilities of onboarding student teams to an intercultural virtual course and what teachers need to be aware of when designing such learning environments. sing a literature review (Tranfield, 2003) as a basis for our research, the results show the importance of the following aspects, when designing the onboarding process of intercultural student teams in virtual courses: meaningful use of technology, precise and communicable course objectives, group formation process, focus on socializing activities and community building as well as common collaboration rules, and general aspects like a clear definition of the teacher's role and intercultural training. The results suggest links for teachers, developers and researchers of onboarding possibilities for intercultural virtual teams.