One school/two campuses: A socio-technical approach for building the distributed classroom

INSEAD, an international business school with campuses in France and Singapore, discovered first-hand the opportunities and challenges that distance and technology can bring for teams and collaboration among knowledge workers. Using off-the-shelf technologies, I used this situation to experiment with a distributed classroom experience in an MBA course. The course was project-based and students had to work on a consulting project in virtual teams distributed in Asia and Europe. This chapter documents the design and implementation of the course and provides lessons for teaching successful transnational classrooms. Observations conducted during this course suggest that the "class," which is enacted with the feeling of belonging to the same group, is a socio-technical construction. Participants evolved their practices and adapted the technology during the course in order to facilitate communication and smooth out interactions across the sites.