Abstract: Educational institutions face complex systemic challenges. Finding innovative, working solutions requires diverse information and creating new collective knowledge across countries, education systems and both public and private sector institutions. Educational leaders need to be change agents with a broad set of competences for managing and leading diverse constantly changing organizations. The Master’s degree programme in Educational Leadership, offered by Tampere University of Applied Sciences, was created to address this need. In the summer 2017 a cohort of 25 experienced education professionals began to study in this collaborative online programme. This paper discusses the cultural and pedagogical challenges and practical solutions that have been discovered when trying to create a strong collaborative learning community in a blended learning programme with participants from Japan, Thailand, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Finland using authentic collaborative e-learning pedagogy.