Mastering the Art of Collaboration at SJSU

Team

Assistant Professor Leslie Speer has been teaching Industrial Design education classes for several years now at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, and currently at San Jose State University’s School of Art & Design. Regardless of the school, all these programs entailed collaborative, team-based courses where students often were from different colleges within a university and sometimes different institutions altogether.

This semester Leslie is running a class project that involves 23 students, several faculty members and members of the project sponsor, a company with locations in France, China and the US.

Team Challenges

Geographically dispersed members, cross-organizational systems and cross-platform operating systems added up to a formidable challenge of getting all team members on the same page throughout the project. The sponsor company’s members, working out of three continents and constrained to their internal IT systems, needed to be actively involved in the project. SJSU faculty members needed to be able to monitor the progress being made and guide and evaluate the students.

It being a design class, there are both Mac and Windows users so any collaboration software that was selected needed to be compatible on both operating systems as well as support Mac applications such as Adobe’s Creative Suite, Ashlar's Graphite and Cobalt and PC applications, including heavy duty 3D modeling software.

Available Tools

As an SJSU faculty member, Leslie has access to the campus-ubiquitous Blackboard and WebCT, (now one company), however these solutions require a steep learning curve, something Leslie could not expect her students and the sponsor’s members to take upon themselves to master. However, the main reason Leslie excluded these solutions from taking the lead role on her project was because she was looking for a genuine collaboration solution that was easy to use, as she clearly was quoted:

“Blackboard is functionally different than Collanos and is built for academia. Collanos is built for collaboration and anyone, no matter what work environment you are from, can use it. WebCT was too difficult. I couldn’t learn it, the students couldn’t learn it, we got too frustrated and just stopped using it.”

Basecamp, another solution Leslie was familiar with and liked, required multiple steps to upload files and even multiple passwords to access their content (one for collaboration and another for accessing the storage).

Solution

Leslie found out about Collanos Workplace when she was working with Professor Sara Beckman teaching a joint MBA class at Haas, UC Berkeley. Having seen a demo of the application, she immediately grasped the magnitude of a peer-to-peer (P2P) team collaboration solution and the value ad hoc teams can benefit from it’s ease of use.

When Leslie embarked on the current team-intensive project at SJSU, she selected Collanos Workplace as the main digital collaboration solution to support the project.

Team members are using Collanos to post and track work, work on documents simultaneously, and to communicate within each individual team. The sponsoring company is able to look at what the students are doing and give feedback to the teams, and Leslie, as the professor, can prepare for class by looking at the student progress the night before.

All project content is available both online and offline in the team workspaces without any hard copies that need to be carried around. During class, when Leslie is lecturing, the electronic smartboard is being used as a lecture tool. At the end of class Leslie saves that document and then posts it up on Collanos and the students can refer to it whenever they want. Often these notes contain vital information for the students which were discovered in the classroom (spontaneously) and, therefore, could not have been in her lecture notes. This ensures that all students get the same information. They do not have to rely so much on their notes.

The requirement to support rich media files in this setting is key to the success of the project, as she demonstrates:

“Yesterday we had a video conference with the sponsor company and the 20-minute event was recorded. It is now up on Collanos for the students to listen to anytime they wish, to remind them of some of the important projects aspects that were discussed. As the teams are embarking on their user research (home-site visits) they will be recording both audio and video and they will be able to post each of their visits onto Collanos immediately so that everyone in the class can share that knowledge.”

Though many of the other software that is out there allow these same sorts of things to happen, there are two main reasons that Leslie chose Collanos, as she explains:

“First of all, it is dead easy to use. Drag and drop, that’s a common mantra amongst Mac users, works superbly on Collanos. Most other software requires extensive uploading steps that make the process of getting work up onto the sites daunting. On Collanos it is easy. Second, the ability for team members to be in different places, open a document and all work on it simultaneously, using the instant messaging tool to communicate (or the discussion tool), makes collaboration across geographical distances possible.”

Leslie immediately followed up with a third reason:

“Another reason that I just figured out while writing this is that the setup of our workspace was super easy. Adding folders and organizing them in an understandable manner is as simple as “add folder”. When it is added you can drag and drop it anywhere.”