After doing a cursory look at a number of systems that claim to be collaboration systems, I settled on taking a spin with Asana. Asana, like the plethora of alternatives out there (Huddle for instance), has the look and feel of an online collaborative project management solution. During the account creation process you are able to add a number of teammates or collaborators to your project. Once you have your project created a number of tools open up to you, the most powerful is the task list. Everything in Asana boils down to tasks.
Tasks are assignable to anyone within the team and can have attachments, due dates, and priorities. Tasks that have been created can even have subtasks if there are a number of smaller sub steps that need to be completed. Team members can leave comments in any task to further elaborate or provide more details and to send and receive feedback. Team members can be notified of changes to tasks by “following” a task or if you would like to be notified via an RSS update each task has it’s own RSS feed. Asana also provides calendar functionality that integrates with tasks. Within the calendar view you can see when tasks are to be completed by and each task has an badge with the assignees initials so that you can see who is working on the tasks quickly. Within the calednar view you can also directly create tasks from the calendar interface. The calendar will sync with other calendar programs and you can easily do a CSV export of all the entries if there is not a native calendar sync. Finally, Asana provides file attachments directly from your computer, dropbox, google drive, or box accounts. All attachments to tasks can be centrally viewed through the attachments functions so that members can easily update, add, and share their files as they relate to their tasks.
Asana could completely replace email as a collaborative tool. As all the tasks are search able and there is definitive accountability for tasks, it is less likely that they would “get lost in the shuffle”; also all of the tasks can be prioritized so that you is further unlikely to get lost. All of your teammates can get instance feedback on where the tasks stand and they don’t have to check in with you; for instance if it hasn’t been updated there are no updates. As this could reduce the amount of people asking for status of a task, you now have more time to continue working without interruptions.
I don’t think that solutions like these could completely replace functionality of some of the course management systems, it could help to augment them. Things like blackboard provide greater functionality that is very specific to course, things like grade views and online quizzes (including automatic grading). The power where some of these collaboration type tools would be augmenting the experience. Asana, for instance, would be great for students while they are working through larger group projects or assignments as Blackboard really only offers email discussions and forum threads for tracking things of this sort. The problem with tools like this is there is a change in the way of thinking that needs to happen. It’s very easy to check and use email for this kind of activity because we are usually checking and using our emails already. We already have to use a course management system this just adds one more thing to check, that you might not already be checking. The value would be for something like Blackboard to integrate with these types of tools (there are so many though that it would not be valuable to them) or include this type of functionality natively in their solution. Things like wikis and basic project management could be very valuable in CMS solutions and could be a differentiating factor for them allowing them to earn and charge more money; all while providing a more unified collaborative environment.
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