University Business - July 2007 - (Page 83)

BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY Working and Learning Better: Virtually Together Collaborative software creates new options for students and educators. By Jean Marie Angelo HERE’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 YahooGroups 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, e- T Those having trouble can show others what they’re looking at online and ask where they’re going wrong. mail 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. 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 of- fer 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 universitybusiness.com July 2007 | 83 http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - July 2007

Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
People Watch
Sense of Place
Marketing
Viewpoint
Human Resources
Money Matters
Financial Aid
Community Colleges
Seeds of Scandal
Controlling the Flow
Special Delivery
Presidential Progress
Best Foot Forward: SOX and Financial Standards
Business Technology
What's New
Calendar of Events
Direct Connect
End Note

University Business - July 2007