Since I’m in school, and since I used to work in the software world, it’s not surprising that I’m interested in how the correct software tools, properly deployed, could improve the student experience. I can’t seem to turn off the product manager part of my brain: “What problems are we trying to solve? What are our pain points? What are our restrictions?” Rather than keep harassing my friends and classmates, perhaps it would be easier just to write down some thoughts:
First, what are some problems facing students, teachers, and administrators could be solved through technology?
- Students need help in document management and collaborative editing. Where’s the latest copy? What are the new changes? How do I combine everyone’s changes?
- Faculty and administrators need to be able to change course schedules, syllabi, and assignments and be confident that students will see and understand those changes.
- The career services office needs to inform students of new opportunities and upcoming deadlines
- Everyone needs to be able to hold conference calls and group chats.
- No one wants to have to worry about the technology: “Do we all have the same IM client? Was that sent by email or posted on the bulletin board?”
- Professors might want to have their lectures recorded, but limit viewing to students enrolled in the class, or to students with a documented disability or need.
Second, what sorts of functionality might be needed to solve those problems?
- Asynchronous information distribution
- Text, like in a blog
- Audio or video of lectures, like with a podcast
- Calendar information and schedule distribution
- Office hours for professors
- Campus and club events
- Job and internship application deadlines
- Free/busy information for rooms and resources
- Free/busy information for people
- Document distribution and versioning
- Lecture notes and syllabi–how do you know if you have the latest version?
- Address book and directory services
- Contact information: phone, email, postal, IM, websites, etc.
- Real time communication
- Instant messaging and text messaging
- Voice chat
- Video chat
- Whiteboarding
- Document distribution
- Both one-on-one and group versions
- Transcripts and recordings available
- Non-real time communication
- Emails
- Bulletin boards
- Voice mail
- Comments
- Group editing
- Real time document editing
- Collecting and merging document changes
- Whiteboarding
- Wikis
- Testing
- Drop box for handing in assignments
- Surveys, polling, and voting
- Data analysis
- Summary statistics
- Pivot tables
- Data collection
Third, what are the restrictions and limitations placed on a technology solution:
- Can a solution be branded or the appearance changed to match the institutions standards?
- Will a solution be accessible?
- Will users always know where to go for information or for a tool?
- Will users be able to choose their client? Will Outlook be required? A specific browser? Some third-party tool?
- Doe user access and role information need to be maintained?
- What security needs exist?
- How hard will end users need to work? How much education will they require to get started? How many steps or clicks will be needed to use the tools?
- Where does the server need to be located?
- Do the tools need to be accessible to people outside the domain or outside the firewall?
Finally, the development and deployment approach needs to be considered:
- A monolithic or waterfall approach, where projects are properly scoped, spec’d, implemented, and tested before deployment
- An iterative or agile approach where incomplete or inadequate tools are deployed to users as quickly as possible, and the users participate in frequent revisions and refinements.
While there are many reasons for the traditional waterfall approach, schools struggle because of their very high turnover (students change classes every semester and graduate after a few years). Furthermore, as schools can be extremely bureaucratic, an iterative approach also allows end users to feel more ownership over the product and might increase adoption.
So, what software? I’ve already begun a page on some free tools. But perhaps the best tools to use are the ones that you already own. Most people do not know how to use the collaborative editing features in MS Word: send for review and merge revisions. And most people don’t know how to use group calendars in Outlook.
In terms of easy ways to get your feet wet, it’s worth trying a blog system as a means of distributing information. Better than a news page, most blog software allows makes it easy to create items, to categorize items, and to have viewers subscribe. Not only is software like WordPress free, but there’s even software to easily manage multiple blogs. If you’re hosting the blog yourself, it should be no problem to include documents and multimedia files as enclosures, or you could use one of the many hosting services–some of which let you keep files private, are free, and have no size or bandwidth limits.
And there are lots more geeky tools. Google Calendar allows you to subscribe to calendars (such as class calendars, or club calendars) so there must be some way to do the same thing in Outlook. Developers have many options in version control software: there must be something that allows students to check in and check out documents and compare versions.
