Collaboration Brings Students, Schools Closer Together

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Collaboration Brings Students, Schools Closer Together

10/7/2004

By Linda L. Briggs

Our tendency as information workers is to try to pool our knowledge and work together whenever we can. That’s just human nature. All too often, though, technology seems to isolate us rather than bring us together. But schools and universities are discovering that recent leaps in collaboration technologies and products can make working together much easier. The right products, in fact, can make collaboration easy and natural—and that, of course, is how it should be.

On college campuses, collaboration technologies can be at the heart of a school’s ability to communicate with students and staff in many ways. Increasing competition for students has upped the ante for schools in marketing their features to students, for example, and collaboration can help. The kinds of data that universities collect—and the myriad ways they use it—has become hugely complex. Again, schools are finding that collaboration products can free up data in old-style departmental “silos,” allowing different departments to share data. And at more and more schools, a notebook computer for every student is the norm—often allowing students to collaborate outside the classroom in new ways.

Systems are evolving in various directions, but some clear examples help show the range of advances on the collaboration front.

For example, at California Polytechnic State University—or Cal Poly—faculty, students and staff have worked closely together to select and implement a new e-mail system from Oracle that highlights some of the best features of collaboration. It will be the basis for a fully integrated and searchable content repository for all forms of communication—from documents to voice mail, Web conferencing, and calendars. Also, the system will eventually make all that accessible through wireless devices.

At the University of San Diego, a small private Catholic university is using the advanced collaboration features of a CRM system to run aspects of the university more like a business—and is becoming more competitive in doing so. The school plans to add additional collaboration tools in the near future.

And at Lansing Community College in Michigan, the selection of Oracle Collaboration Suite moved the school from multiple silo-type systems where data sharing was difficult or impossible, to today’s integration across campus of e-mail, calendaring and files.

These widely diverse examples help show how collaboration technologies are evolving and changing the way groups meet and work on campus, both in the classroom and outside it.

Cal Poly: Collaboration in Action

At Cal Poly, a state university located near the coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco in San Luis Obispo, a new collaborative e-mail system truly represents the will of the school’s some 18,000 students. That’s because students participated heavily in the selection of the software to replace the school’s outdated system. The selection process, which reflects the school’s hands-on approach to education, produced a decision earlier this year to purchase Oracle Collaboration Suite.