Defining collaboration

Collaboration involves working with others to produce outputs and/or achieve shared goals. The outcome of collaboration is usually a physical product or a measurable achievement, like solving a problem or making a decision.

University students frequently find that collaboration (or a related concept like teamwork) is a key learning outcome of a particular subject or course. This is because collaboration is often considered to be a central feature of graduate employability: it’s thought that students who know how to collaborate will be better positioned for success when they graduate. Consequently, university courses regularly require students to work with others in group projects.

In my experience, however, many students tend to avoid group work or otherwise worry about it. This is because collaboration is daunting. We often feel we lose control over something if we’re collaborating: other people might let us down, or collaborating might mean we have to deal with divergent views or ways of working that differ from our own. This can be greatly challenging.

Nevertheless, collaboration is a crucial aspect of the production of knowledge and culture in the digital age. The outcomes of collaboration can be world-changing. To give just one example, the COVID-19 vaccines that were produced in 2021 were the result of collaborations between very large teams of experts as well as partnerships between organisations and across the public and private sectors. Knowledge-sharing between these teams and organisations ensured that the desired outcome was achieved. It’s unlikely that such a complex and vital knowledge product could have emerged as the result of a solo effort.

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Like communication itself, collaboration is something that can be done well, or poorly. In this sense, we can describe collaboration as a skill.

Commonly, collaboration is considered to be a transferable skill: that is, a skill we develop in one setting that we can subsequently transfer to others. For instance, a student working on a group project might hone their collaboration skills in a way that is beneficial to their future professional practice.

Collaboration also intersects with other transferable skills like communication and critical thinking – indeed, all three of these skills are often identified as vital for participation in rapidly changing work futures, but as skills and attributes they’re also engaged in a complex interplay (Thornhill Miller et al. 2023). For example, one cannot necessarily collaborate with others effectively if one is not a good communicator.

Meanwhile, advances in communication technology allow us to connect, communicate, and work with others around the globe. Increasingly, then, when we collaborate we may be doing so across cultural boundaries. This means intercultural communication is a key skill required for effective collaboration. Drawing from our definition of communication as the sharing of meaning, we might define intercultural communication as the process through which people from different cultures create shared meanings together.

But collaboration is not just a skill. As Keyton and co-authors point out (2008: 377-378), collaboration can be seen as both a process and a structure: yes, collaboration is something people do, but without a certain structure in place to support collaborative interaction, collaboration will not happen.

We can even describe collaboration as a mindset or attitude, because a group of people can work together in a way that is not collaborative if they do not treat their work as a collaboration or if there are other barriers to collaboration, such as distrust, antagonism, misunderstanding, or inequality.

Collaboration can be synchronous (happening in real time) or asynchronous (occurring at different times). In both cases, it might be enabled by digital tools and it might take place in virtual spaces. Indeed, digital tools including email, social media, videoconferencing, and even augmented or virtual reality allow collaboration to occur across temporal and geographic boundaries. Using such tools, we can collaborate with people across the world and/or people who cannot connect with us in real time. For this reason, it is becoming common for professional practitioners across various fields to collaborate in virtual teams (Swart et al. 2022).

The digitisation of content has played a crucial role in this rise of collaborative work practices. Digital tools extend and mediate our capacity to work with others. And as we saw in Chapter 1, digital technologies of communication have created a culture of speed – today, it’s easy to collaborate because information can be shared quickly, even instantly. However, we need to ask: what kind of expectations (and problems) does this create? How does this culture of speed impact the collaborative production of culture, information, and knowledge? And what new skills and competencies will be needed to support collaboration in emerging and diverse professional futures?