C O LLABORAT I O N As project- based learning picks up steam, faculty members are turning to innovative software tools to foster better teamwork among students. This is the fourth installment in a six- part series on collaborative learning. Previous articles in the series can be found here: Highly Collaborative Classroom Furniture Enhancing Coursework With Social Tools Collaborating via Web Conference COLLABORATIVE, project- based learning is to higher education what Downton Abbey is to TV — all the rage. More than ever, faculty and students are working jointly on documents, sharing screens in class, swapping course materials, and taking their collective pulse through polls. Nevertheless, many faculty members complain that technical support for group projects is lagging on campus, leaving them searching for solutions elsewhere. While some faculty have found free tools such as Google Docs and Dropbox sufficient, others are adopting more specialized software. Here are four examples of how faculty are facilitating collaboration in their classes: 1) Document Sharing Last year, when the University of Michigan launched a pilot project with commercial data- storage solution Box, Melissa Gross was eager to participate. A professor in the School of Kinesiology, she was searching for a viable way to share large video files with her students. While Box solved her initial problem, the service has gone one step further: It’s helping her students learn how to do collaborative work. For many of Gross’ classroom assignments, students must create videos of 3D animation and motioncapture technologies. Unfortunately, the resulting files are too large to fit in other campus file- sharing tools. “ Students would upload them to YouTube or Vimeo, but then they wouldn’t set the permissions right or wouldn’t name things correctly,” recalls Gross. “ So, when I put them in my download folder, I wouldn’t know who they were from. I was taking too much time finding their work.” M+ Box, UM’s branded version of Box, offers users 50 GB of storage, which more than meets her students’ needs. While Gross no longer expends effort locating student david raths CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | February 2013 18 Courtesy of Winona State Univ., Teaching, Learning & Technology Services Togetherware: Tools for Teamwork SCREEN- SHARING software enables cross- disciplinary student projects at Winona State University.