7 Tips When Designing Collaborative Learning Experiences

Collaborative learning experiences are critical to the curriculum because they offer several benefits that cannot be replicated by simply accessing information online for free. While online resources can provide a wealth of information, collaborative learning experiences offer a unique set of benefits that are critical to the curriculum. By actively engaging learners, exposing them to diverse perspectives, promoting social interaction, developing cooperative skills, and providing opportunities for feedback and reflection, collaborative learning experiences can help learners to develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter and prepare them for success in their careers.

To design a curriculum that cultivates inclusion, collaboration, and innovation, consider the following steps:

1. Define your goals and objectives: Clearly outline what you hope to achieve through the curriculum, such as promoting inclusivity and cultural competency, fostering collaboration, and encouraging creative thinking. Think about how you can include the planning committee, previous participants and also new participants in defining the goals before each new program launch. SkillVill has "packets" designed to help you lead your own mastermind sessions and goal setting meetings to help your teams refine your goals and objectives in a more inclusive way.

2. Incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content: This could include topics such as unconscious bias, intersectionality, cultural competency, and allyship. SkillVill has "packets" of questions, tasks, resources and discussion topics created by experts and professors that you can easily tie in with your existing curriculum. You can also create your own content and share with our global packets of shared resources on these topics and more.

3. Emphasize team-based learning and project work: Encourage teams to work in groups and give them opportunities to collaborate on projects that allow for creative problem solving. SkillVill provides you tools to create "circles" where teams can collab and workshop together using your unique process and curated content on each step of their journey together.

4. Foster a growth mindset: Teach your teams to embrace challenges and view mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow. SkillVill has "packets" to develop and implement the growth mindset alongside your relevant curriculum. As usual, you too have the option to add your own packets to share globally if you'd like to pay-it-forward.

5. Provide opportunities to apply what the teams learn: Incorporate real-world, experiential learning activities that allow individuals to apply their knowledge and skills in meaningful ways. SkillVill "circles" can flow/connect with real world experts, communities, and local organizations to begin to directly relate your curriculum learned and mastered with your own teams to be implemented to solve community issues.

6. Evaluate and revise the curriculum regularly: Gather feedback from everyone and use this information to continuously improve the curriculum and ensure that it is achieving its goals. SkillVill has "packets" for the organizers of the teams as well so that they too can improve by asking many overlooked questions and explore how to get the most out of their data insights, including those who weren't engaged and how to revise curriculum to include more diverse participation.

7. Encourage a culture of continuous learning and improvement: Encourage everyone (even the organizers) to continue learning and growing, both inside and outside the program, and to embrace new ideas and perspectives. SkillVill's global "packets" enable asynchronous knowledge and resource sharing across a variety of experts and industries to expand your perspectives together.

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