Higher Education

Easy Collaboration

By Tim ⋅ June 25, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

With an increased focus in higher education on distance education and online learning, professors are looking to find ways to aid in the collaborative effort of a class when your students are spread out across the state (and possibly the globe). How do you provide a vehicle for interaction and group activity without the ability to meet in person? There are a variety of web tools that have sprung up to meet this very need and today I’m going to look at a small sample of what’s out there.

One of the first things you will find a need for in a distance learning environment is real-time chat. Although for many courses it is not a requirement that the student attend, it is nevertheless beneficial to provide realtime virtual feedback on how the course is going and to possibly present information for students comfortable with that mode of learning. One tool that integrates nicely with Blackboard is Wimba. Wimba allows full audio conferencing, screen-sharing, document uploads, and a variety of other features. If you don’t need a large subset of features take a look at Zoho Chat or Campfire. All of these products allow you to meet with your students, share files and documents, as well as archive a history of your conversations.

With any group discourse you will likely need a way of collaborating on documents. Again the web is not short on tools to provide this function. The leader in the pack is Google Docs and Spreadsheets. With support for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents and full integration with Google search, this product has a lot of bang for the price (did I mention it was free). However a growing competitor is previously mentioned Zoho who provides their own suite of products. Perhaps you’re looking for something that gives you simple document collaboration without all the bells and whistles. I can recommend two great products, WriteWith and Writeboard. Both products keep a full version history and include commenting. WriteWith also provides the ability to assign tasks to various students.

Another type of product that has grown around the idea of collaboration is wikis. Despite the curious name, the popularity of wikis like Wikipedia has spurred a large assortment of products in this area. Wikis allow a group of users to collaborate on documentation and keep a revision history of all contributions. While it is possible to host your own solution internally using products like MediaWiki (which Wikipedia is built on) or TiddlyWiki, if you would rather using a fully-hosted solution there are plenty of options at your disposal. PBwiki claims to help you create a wiki “as easy as a peanut butter sandwich. Other popular solutions include Wetpaint and Wikia.

At this point you are perhaps a bit overwhelmed by the assortment of what the web has to offer. This article only begins to cover the surface of the many innovating and useful tools being built “in the cloud” as more and more users turn to the web to handle their services and information. For even more great Web 2.0 tools be sure to check out The Web 2.0 Directory. With any tool I would suggest that you sign up, give the interface a shot, and if you like it, rock on. Distance education has never been easier.

Tags: chat, collaboration, distance learning, wikis