THERE'S A NEW TYPE OF workspace these days. It's a "virtual office" in cyberspace that allows files to be accessed and worked on from anywhere. The concept has morphed into education, allowing students in disparate locations to work together. The innovation fits well with new trends in learning.
"A lot of student learning takes place outside the classroom," says Andrew Milne, CEO of Tidebreak, a collaborative solutions company. Higher ed has moved beyond the lecture-driven "sage on the stage," and many lessons are now centered around teams of students solving problems and digesting case studies. MBA students are writing business plans and students are working on urban planning or economic models as groups. They can do this on desktop computers, laptops, or PDA devices.
It has pushed administrators to turn every nook and cranny of campus into learning space. With this movement comes new hardware and software requirements.
COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES
Collaborative technologies' development, begun in the mid-1990s, has spawned a number of options. Approaches can include software that creates virtual desktops to hardware that gives multiple users a better view of their work. Some analysts categorize online applications such as Yahoo- Groups and similar solutions from AOL and MSN as collaborative technologies.
Group collaboration software, which allows people to work together on projects, is a test of "sharing" skills, allowing users to access the same address book, calendar, email clients, and work files. The users could be together in the same room, or located at various points around the globe.
Major company options include Microsoft's collaborative program SharePoint. Users can collaborate on files while conducting enterprise searches for information and management content, creating and entering portals to other information, and running business intelligence applications. Other programs available for use in education include TeamSpot, a collaborative learning system from Tidebreak, and software from South River Technologies that creates virtual desktops for remote access.
Those having trouble can show others what they're looking at online and ask where they're going wrong.
In higher ed, distance education is driving the need for collaboration. Students and faculty need flexibility. There's no more need to be in the same place at the same time to add to a project or learn material.
It has become more common to offer students server space for storing work. It seems a logical step-and a safer one in terms of network security. Prior to collaboration software, users might e-mail files as attachments back and forth from campus to home-a practice with inherent dangers. Files can become corrupt and introduce viruses to the network. Also, using e-mail in this way creates unnecessary traffic.
"Everyone is looking to reduce the load on the e-mail server," says Tracy Welsh, VP of Business Development for South River Technologies. E-mail accounts can receive up to 500 spam messages per day. Is it wise to have more important documents traveling in the mix? "You don't want to be pushing graphics and PowerPoint presentations through that pipe," she says. There's also the possibility of having multiple versions of a spreadsheet or Word file floating around.
But file sharing brings new challenges. Creating collaboration processes took three years at the University of Portland (Ore.), reports Byron Fessler, vice president for Information Services. IT administrators began creating a collaborative strategy in 2004 to give ubiquitous access to files and e-mail. That year collaborative file sharing was the "talk of the town" at EDUCAUSE and other IT conferences, Fessler recalls.
UP's plan became a reality last year, when collaborative software was first used in the School of Engineering. That plan required the university to replace the school's outdated network (which meant students had to actually go to the building to access their files) with one that was much more convenient. Fessler needed to make sure students had access during the upgrade and that other utilities were compatible with the new virtual system.
The end result: Group Drive from South River Technologies. Along with the convenience of anywhere file access, students can use any operating system. Engineering students, says Fessler, like to dabble in various operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and UNIX. After installing collaborative software in the School of Engineering, Fessler rolled out the program this spring to the entire campus. "We used the Oregon Trail approach," he jokes. The project was broken into four distinct phases: pioneer, migration, settlement, and just rewards. The latter would include the benefit of working easier with others.
