Work Together While Apart
Collaborating with colleagues across great distances is becoming easier and easier with technology. Faculty at the University of Minnesota are using UMConnect to deliver lectures while traveling to conferences. Teams of staff and faculty write reports together and discuss dissemination techniques for grant projects. Graduate students stay connected with advisers while conducting research abroad. As broadband speeds become ubiquitous in the US, high-speed connections allow close to real time collaboration across great distance.
There are many technologies at the University that can help students, faculty, and staff work together from afar.
* Conduct live meetings with voice, chat, and screen sharing in UMConnect. Any staff or faculty member can create a UMConnect meeting. You can keep your meeting private and require log in, or allow open access so guests of the University can participate.
* For ongoing collaboration, like committee work or grant projects, myU is a useful and efficient technology platform. Groups can create an entire site, with pages for sub-committees to gather their work, discuss important topics, share calendars and to do lists, and collaboratively write documents. myU sites can be open access or limited to group members only. Step-by-step instructions for creating collaboration sites in myU are available in myU help.
* UMConnect is also a useful tool for groups to discuss a document, website, or video together. One user in UMConnect can share their screen. The other users see the view the screen while text chatting or using voice to discuss the file on screen. Users can save the session, so the group has a record of their meeting.
