The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) defines collective intelligence as the process by which a large group of individuals gather and share their knowledge, data and skills for the purpose of solving societal issues.

You could also say that collective intelligence is a kind of wisdom and knowledge that grows out of a group. The concept of collective intelligence states that when people work together, they form a type of intelligence that simply cannot exist on the individual level.

Collective intelligence is therefore shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making.

It has been around for a long time, but the rise of new technologies that connect more and more individuals over greater distances to share knowledge and skills has transformed what can be achieved. Collective intelligence is used to help create widely known platforms such as Google and Wikipedia.

Essentially, in the same way IQ describes individual intelligence, collective intelligence performs the function on a broader scale. It’s also proven to be a dynamic concept, subject to new evolutions spurred on by the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence technologies.

Collective intelligence strongly contributes to the shift of knowledge and power from the individual to the collective.

In education collaborative intelligence learners will work in a more social , cooperative , transparent environment. They can see models of works , know the standards that they will work on and this will produce an ideal educational development.

The most important intelligence in the foreseeable is not Artificial Intelligence but, rather, a collective intelligence that includes both people and computers. And this is where there is a major opportunity currently untapped by many organisations.

Organisations can improve productivity and creativity by creating the right conditions to tap into the wealth of information and knowledge about their systems, processes, products and customers.

Leaders that value the experience, knowledge and insight potential gained over many years by employees, seek to harness this collective intelligence and the many business benefits it offers. By doing so, they are giving their employees an important voice in the organisation, a key feature in engaged workforces.

sources: 

https://www.clearpeople.com/blog/what-is-collective-intelligence-workplace