Pandemics like COVID-19 highlight the needs and pitfalls of inclusive and equitable education in a digital society. IT-based instructional designs are needed to increase learners’ expertise, and to develop higher-order thinking skills. Instructional designs for collaborative learning (CL) seem to be a promising solution. However, they are mostly suitable for face-to-face and not for distance teaching. The core problem that impedes their reusability and scalability is a ‘collaboration problem’ for which collaboration engineering (CE) provides guidance. Therefore, we deploy a design science research study and contribute to CL and CE literature. We develop requirements and provide the design of an IT-based collaborative work practice fostering CL. We provide empirical evidence with an online experiment in a large-scale lecture with undergraduate business information students. This reveals that groups of learners who followed our CL experience achieve higher levels of expertise than those who followed a traditional ad hoc CL experience.