Dan: I think the lesson here is to not allow a group to remain headless at the end of the first meeting, and to also have a conversation about communication expectations right away.

Terri: Any chance you can add an “RSS Link for Comments” to your blog? Once I left a comment and forgot to click the “e-mail me follow-up comments” box, I couldn’t figure out how to keep up with this conversation other than re-visiting the page manually.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. Key to your and Dan’s comments — and to any implementation of technology is that we need to understand the people, the processes, the technology, the structure of the organization, and the external environment (the STAR for those familiar with my course). You hit on two of these right away in that you focused on “all participants are working out of different overall IT infrastructure and expectations, and the short course schedule” (note that this process/tech combination looks like a short multiorganizational project as well as a student project).

Yes, Angel only works if the implementation is heavy handed — people don’t want to visit yet another site. …but if all communication is centered there, and that communication is valuable, it gets used.

As to your suggested practice focused on email lists — been there, done that, Angel is better, and I bet we can improve still on Angel.

In my experience students quickly get annoyed by flurries of class email (most don’t use filtering that might make this less annoying). People in general tend to read the last first, and so the learning pattern can also be odd if people don’t read the whole discussion. You are also right that keeping the address list up to date can be a trial.

Here’s where I have an advantage — given that I’m teaching courses focused on process and/or process and technology — I have an opportunity to teach new/better ways of managing communication and process support. I’d rather work on the people and the process than revert to less powerful technologies. That said, many highly successful and technologically savvy organizations still use email distribution — but those I know are also quickly moving to a portal strategy as these become easier to use.

“simple for the end user” was another point that resonated for me. Dylan and your posts are pushing me to come up with a set of suggestions for student project teams (I’ll start there and we can see if it would add value to other organizational groups too). A combination of Facebook and Google may be the answer. I’ve stuck to Angel given the security issues around grades — which they handle well as a true classroom management site. Perhaps the new “super” page will just link to Angel for that aspect.

As to archiving on Angel, you can download all the files (and as the originator, I can archive the course) - Lessons, Utilities, Download…

More soon…

With a combination of Google Sites with embedded Google Docs links, I think you could create one great virtual class database. I think the key to creating helpful online tools is to keep it simple for the end user. You would think that every group project would immediately set up a project page, but I have not found this the case at SCU. During the “forming” stage of the [headless] group, email seems to be dominant. At some point, a central document storage and central location for writing collaborative papers is helpful. Enter Google Groups and Google Docs.

In a recent group project this quarter, there was a large gap between those who checked email frequently verses those who check it a few times a week. This has created a lot of project delays as group questions become answered by only part of the group. With an Iphone, I wear my email, so my answers are generally returned quickly (and are brief).

Lastly, there is an issue of archiving. When the project (or class) ends, what do you do with the data? How would this help future groups with a similar project or similar class. There seems to be no easy way to “zip” an entire class or project one to disk or in a “past projects” folder on the website.

I enjoyed this post and I learn a lot from your blog.

I wonder if your EMBA course has some important differences from most workplace projects, notably that all participants are working out of different overall IT infrastructure and expectations, and the short course schedule.

I would expect that many students don’t understand all of the features of Angel, and some rarely sign in at all unless prodded repeatedly by the instructor or other students. Has this been your experience or am I naive about it?

Is something like this appropriate for a course attended by part-time students who do not already live in RSS-based world:

1. Instructor sets up a public e-mail list of all students (and ensures that the list is 100% complete and accurate). This is by itself enough of an IT management challenge for a short course.

2. Instructor encourages students to ask/answer important questions on the list so that the information is quickly spread to all students.

3. Instructor quickly corrects any misinformation spread on the list.

4. Instructor dissiminates important announcements in person, again over e-mail, and ensures that a public archive of e-mail messages is available.

As you can see, 1-1 e-mail is not prominent in this suggestion, but an e-mail distribution list is. If you were to use something like a public website or Wiki page, it would serve a similar fundamental purpose but you would lose a subset of your audience who doesn’t use the tool because they’re too busy catching up on their e-mail