Collaboration and Orchestration in a Virtual Teaching Organization of Environmental Education

In the information era, Virtual Teaching Organizations (VTOs) development is an important probe of creative education. This paper explores an investigation on the inter-departmental VTO in a college-wide general elective course Environment and Sustainable Development (VTO-ESD) that involves teachers who come from six majors in four departments in a Chinese university. In order to achieve ground-breaking expectations for the teachers' teaching and research capacity of working at the virtual community, it is critical to enhance their skills of team collaboration and communication during the development process in practice. The VTO-ESD is an example of a large curriculum teaching organization that may be organically split into divisions based on diverse factors such as environmental education research, textbooks, teaching reform, training in teaching methods, case studies, and so on. Problem-Based Cooperation has been recognized as a good way to improve trust between team members, boost organizational resilience through the synergistic impact, and accomplish sustainable development and collective progress through deliberate and in-depth communication and exchange.