University Business - February 2010 - (Page 38)

Meet Me Online Community ConsCienCe: Social Media Builds Online Collaboration “Over the past 10 years we’ve seen cOllabOratiOn move from inside an organization to a federated connection between other entities,” says cameron evans, Microsoft education ctO. “communities are an important part of collaboration.” with the surge in social media usage, it’s no wonder colleges and universities are finding ways to network for academic purposes. people want to collaborate in a familiar and secure environment, evans says. Microsoft is working on a way to allow users to authenticate each other’s existing sharepoint, which would eliminate the need to create and host additional iDs. “there will be fewer gates for people to jump through.” During the 2009 eDUcaUse conference in november, elluminate launched learncentral, which rajeev arora, vice president of strategy and marketing, calls “Facebook for educators.” intended as a networking resource for teachers, faculty members have been creating private communities for their classes where students can hold discussions and retrieve assignments. “Once you launch a product people find uses for it,” arora says. “the social web has greatly expanded the definition of collaboration,” says Jon corshen, ceO of GoingOn. the community building platform allows colleges and universities to build public or private communities with social media elements ranging from live chat and forums to wikis and video sharing. “More and more we are being called upon to serve online communities, or collaborative activities, that we couldn’t serve with blackboard,” says Marni baker stein, director of program development for the college of liberal and professional studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “these projects include students, but also many other groups and institutes.” One such project was the Global environmental sustainability collaborative, which included students from penn, Japan, china, Korea, and russia, as well as practitioners from around the globe representing 43 countries. “we needed a platform that allowed multiple levels of access and collaboration,” stein says. providing every participant with an authenticated iD to the penn network would have been “a logistical mess,” so the collaborative leaders agreed to be a beta site for GoingOn. stein says it is amazing to watch communities in the Gesc and other programs grow organically as users make connections and find shared interests. when one positive psychology course ended the students moved the group to Facebook so they could continue the conversation. 38 | February 2010 Clemson University (S.C.) leaders realized their Adobe Connect system can be used for more cost effective training sessions. in two different buildings and had varying schedules, the software helped us stay on the same page.” Reviewing student applications for graduate school can be as much of a collaborative project as updating a web page, an issue familiar to the school of education at Indiana University. A paperbased application review process meant “folders were getting lost or not getting processed quickly so we were losing candidates,” says Larry Riss, director of educational technology services. The problem was addressed five years ago when they switched to an electronic process using Microsoft SharePoint. Now students fill out an online application, which feeds into the SIS, which feeds into SharePoint. Documents received later in the cycle can also be added to the student record. Once a full application is received, committee members receive a notice from the system that it is available for review. “The committees can mark-up [applications] in SharePoint, comment on the candidate, update the record status, note missing information, etc.,” Riss explains. The record for an admitted student can then be pushed out of SharePoint back into the SIS. Converting to the new system met the usual resistance to a change in process. It was managed by making it “inconvenient” for committee members to continue using the hard-copy folders by requiring them to stay in the office during use. As the system has grown in acceptance, other uses have been added, such as tracking fellowships. “We captured all the rule sets so everyone can see what the donor intended,” Riss says. “As fellowships are suggested, we document it so we don’t over-commit or not use the funds.” “The bottom line is to make data visible, so all the faculty in the school can see all the information,” he adds. Power Collaborators Of course, college and university faculty and staff collaborate with more people than those located down the hall. Team members might be located on a satellite campus or at an entirely different institution, in which case video and web conferencing are the collaboration tools of choice. An initiative in the state of Nevada to adopt a standard learning management system for high schools and public colleges and uniuniversitybusiness.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - February 2010

University Business - February 2010
Contents
Editor’s Note
Behind the News
Viewpoint
Internet Technology
Independent Outlook
Universities Go to School
Leveraging Technology to Increase Enrollment, Capacity, and Revenues
Meet Me Online
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
What’s New
End Note

University Business - February 2010