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This work investigates the social collaboration and creative outcomes of teams of learners in Higher Education (HE) Design studies, in the context of cross-organizational (university/industry) Communities of Practice (CoP). These refer to groups of people who share a common interest in a field and connect to co-create knowledge. The study focuses on the feedback delivered by the industrial members of the CoP through the means of collaboration technologies, to complement academic feedback. Findings have shown a twofold effect on learners. On the one hand, critical feedback on the deliverables increased both the time-pressure and the complexity of the work, affecting the teams' perception of their performances. On the other hand, feedback appeared to inspire better creative outcomes while improving the teams' metacognitive activity and learning regulation. Furthermore, it enabled learners to pragmatically realize their status within the broader geography of professional practice and reconfigure their achievement goals accordingly. These findings confirm the contribution of crossorganizational CoPs in HE and are discussed with reference to CoPs theory and modes of belonging as fundamental for learning and identity evolution.

This work investigates Communities of Practice (CoPs) that support social learning in higher education. While most CoP research has taken place in single-stream contexts (e.g. in a university), this study reports on the ecology of a cross-organizational community (university and industry stakeholders) in the context of the formal curriculum. The work examines the role of technology configurations in supporting CoPs in Design and related studies. It also reports on the type and level of technology adoption, focusing on the learner perspective. This study's CoP is made up of 21 third-year university students and ten external stakeholders (mentors, clients and industrial experts). The study concludes with a set of guidelines for the design and evaluation of similar CoP technology configurations. Key guidelines suggest a) supporting enhanced awareness of identity, space and time, b) enabling roles and permissions on-demand according to the requirements of the activities carried out in shared spaces and c) facilitating fluid interoperability between the domain-specific and mainstream/generic productivity tools used by the community. The outcomes of this work can assist instructors, researchers and practitioners in the design of similar technology configurations for CoPs in the formal curricula of their respective Design or relevant fields.

Creativity, a primary academic objective, is crucial in higher education, as economic, informational, societal and environmental advancements rely on people's ability to innovate. Creativity is widely investigated in its individualistic form, yet there is a notable dearth in work that studies its collective dimension, from a learning perspective. This study focuses on validating the psychometric properties of an existing instrument (ASCC), by measuring creative collaboration in blended learning settings. Two hundred and thirty six under and postgraduate students self-evaluated their creative collaboration experiences, using the ASCC instrument. The findings of exploratory factor analysis denote a three-factor (21-item) structure, measuring 'Synergistic Social Collaboration', 'Distributed Creativity', and 'Time Regulation and Achievement', with good internal consistency. An instrument with valid psychometric properties for the assessment of creative collaboration is much-needed in the growing research and practitioners' community. This is critical in the fields of Design, HCI and Engineering, that rely extensively on the creative collaboration (online and offline) of teams to develop innovative products that are suitable for real-world purposes.

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