Collaborative case studies and computer‐supported collaborative learning (CSCL) play an important role in the modern education environment. A number of researchers have given significant attention to learning design in order to improve the satisfaction of collaborative learning. Although collaboration engineering (CE) is a mature method widely used for collaboration design, there is limited research as to whether CE is useful for learning design, in particular, case studies. Therefore, in this paper, we designed a contrastive case study in two small classes of a Chinese university. In the first part, we encouraged a teacher to use CE tools to design a learning process. Since Chinese students had limited access to CE platforms, we used our special tool—the Discussion Platform as the main CE tool. A total of 40 students and a teacher collaborated in our first experiment and were asked to complete a survey upon completion of the interviews. In our comparison study, the teacher gave the same task to another 31 students, yet omitted the use of CE tools to design the learning process. In this paper, we compare the results obtained and determine the advantage that CE methods have on learning effectiveness and student satisfaction.