Teaching and learning have changed significantly due to the impact of the COVID19 pandemic, even for modules that were already delivered primarily digitally before the pandemic. Students have minimal social interaction in the context of higher education and face additional challenges outside of the university. This leads to a lack of engagement and also higher drop-out rates. Above all, the lower level of communication with instructors and the course offerings created during the rush into e-learning in early 2020 are intensively discussed as reasons. These effects were also felt in the hybrid modules based on the Virtual Collaborative Learning (VCL) framework. The following field report takes up the lessons learned just before and during the COVID19 pandemic and reflects on them within the scope of the four design dimensions of VCL: professional pedagogical support, technical platform, authentic task design, and learning analytics support. Particularly during the summer semester of 2020, we could observe a certain decrease in student engagement. Thus, adjustments were made to each design dimension during the pandemic that, in combination, showed an improvement in student engagement. In particular, good timing in communication and constant accessibility of supervisors are perceived as helpful. But also optimal conditions of the technical platform concerning tools, usability, and usefulness as well as the anchoring of social interactions in the instructional design were seen as conducive to engagement. Finally, Learning Analytics offers another perspective that leads to social interaction. Nevertheless, rapid iterative adaptation is associated with high effort for teachers, which needs to be reduced through the ongoing improvement of the four design dimensions.