"Solutions not Excuses" - Learnings from the BIP: Winter School´25

In January 2025 eight educational developers from the EuroTeQ university alliance organized a winter school for thirteen computer science teachers as a Blended Intensive Program (BIP). The intension was to spark collaboration on joint courses and to pilot a program on how to teach in an international and hybrid classroom. In the alliance, we are currently challenged on how to engage teachers in EuroTeQ, encouraging them to open their courses to alliance students, and creating joint courses with partners. The main question we seek to answer in this paper is if the blended intensive format is worth the effort and promotes engagement. Through temporal mapping of empiric data, grounded analysis and team-based interpretation, we found that discussing good teaching and learning, joint courses and intercultural exchange led to a change of perspective from collaboration towards cocreation, focusing on solutions rather than excuses. We also found that teachers and educational developers form distinct learning communities, both of which contribute to the shift from a collaboration mindset toward co-creation. Furthermore, we observed that engaging in co-creation catalysed the transformation of the educational developers´ Professional Learning Community into a Community of Practice.