One of the main goals of a two-day workshop of both groups of students was to prepare and present short papers on partial topics to a given framework problem in small groups.

This task was extremely difficult for students:

• IHI Zittau students, on the one hand, and TU students in Liberec, on the other hand, did not know one another personally before the workshop, but had to communicate in advance on the presentation topics by using a "virtual" preparation phase supported by electronic media.
• Zittau students studying ecological issues attended a workshop within the seminar "Intercultural Communication", while a workshop for students from Liberec was part of their field of study. Relevant and interesting topics had to be offered to both groups in order to create interdisciplinary working groups.
• On the IHI Zittau side, students from two study programs took part in the workshop in English, they came from almost 20 countries and four continents: the interdisciplinary working groups were complemented by a high degree of inter-culturalism.
• In order to systematically prevent the formation of small cultural and sectoral working groups, the groups were formed through elections so that no more than two representatives of one study program or one nationality were represented in one group.

In order to have successfully accomplished this uneasy task, the workshop itself was preceded by two joint videoconferences in which the students got acquainted with one another and in which possible working group inquiries could be discussed in advance. Further training took place through an educational platform and social media, so that at their real meeting the working groups could already be based on a comprehensive preliminary agreement and preparation without really knowing one another.